Motes

Motes are networked computing's answer to The Borg. Motes are miniature, thumb-sized computers attached to radio transceivers, powered by batteries or solar cells. Motes can even be as small as pinheads. Smart dust is a moniker applied to a pile of a few hundred pinhead-sized motes.

Motes are autonomous, always on, and sometimes invisible computing and networking devices. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of these little devices can be sprinkled about some geographical area or even the surface of a wall (think "smart paint"). They are extremely simple devices that know how to do just a few things well: listen for each other and pass along information that is sensed among all motes in a network, for example. They form a virtual ad-hoc network that can "self-organize" into little computer "societies."

Motes are real. You can buy them today. They are currently too expensive and bulky for most of their envisioned applications but are nonetheless demonstrable. Time will drive down size and cost. They represent a long-sought-after mode of computing wherein devices with minimal processing power are networked together to produce major intelligence. They are every bit a part of the Inescapable Data revolution in that they can be deployed pervasively, communicate wirelessly, and gather and forward data that is digested into information in real time.

Motes can be fitted with a range of sensors that can detect light, sound, vibration, airborne chemicals, radiationjust about anything that is detectable electronically. They can be mounted on trees, machines, warehouse racks, telephone poles, even miniature planes and robotic devices. They develop an "awareness" of each other using radio transceivers to talk to each other, relaying their data messages back though a wireless mesh-like network, from mote to mote, to centralized data aggregators connected to the Internet. Motes can also be interfaced to other Inescapable Data technologies such as RFID.

Mote Details

Motes were created by the University of California at Berkley and Intel several years ago. There are more than 100 groups around the world today using motes for various exploratory and research topics.^[1] DARPA somewhat gave life to the idea, which was originally known as smart dust. The original idea was to sprinkle thousands of these devices around battlefields to monitor troop movements.

Motes can be as small as a small stack of quarters. (The battery still dominates the size.) Although they are not yet at an inconsequential price, the goal is to have sub-$25 motes within a few years. Advances are occurring along compressing more CPU power into a smaller size (including the radio and RAM parts). Motes today are typically as powerful as the old 8088-based IBM PC, vintage 1982a pretty hefty amount of power in such a small package. A number of firms are building motes and mote-like devices. Crossbow (www.xbow.com) is one such company.

^[1] http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/OEG20030128S0028.

Computers typically run operating systems, and motes are no exception. They run TinyOS and store data in a distributed database called TinyDB, both are products of the "open-source" movement. TinyDB can be queried from outside the mesh network via the Internet when it comes time to harvest their bounty of collected data. Or they can communicate data in real time, sensing and identifying the source of a toxic chemical spill in a factory, for example.

So far, motes have been used by scientists to collect data from large spaces over time without the necessity of having to constantly be on site (such as climate data in pristine forests or bird-nesting behaviors on uninhabited islands). However, potential commercial and military applications abound. For example, motes that sense movement and are attached to mobile anti-tank mines could triangulate among themselves the location of a moving tank on a battlefield and reposition themselves accordingly.

Motes indeed leverage the combined use of relay communication (and mesh communication) as well as data collection, to a scale unthinkable before their invention. Whether it is actually "motes" that become pervasive or something else like semi-intelligent RFID tags, we will most assuredly see mass-deployable devices that wirelessly communicate with each other and a centralized processing system while gathering data.