Geombinatorics of "Smart Dust"

Authors

Edward Vidal
Luc Longpre, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Huang Haitao

Publication Date

10-2000

Comments

UTEP-CS-00-20c.

Published in Geombinatorics, 2001, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 54-58.

Abstract

Smart Dust is a collection of small sensor-equipped leaves which send their information to two or more receivers. When a receiver gets a signal from a sensor, it can determine the direction from which this signal came. By combining the directions from two different receivers, we can determine the 3-D locations of all the leaves, and thus, transform their sensor readings into a 3-D picture of the corresponding parameters (temperature, moisture, etc.). The more leaves we send, the more information we gather. However, since the direction can only be measured with a certain accuracy, when we send too many leaves, we lose the ability to match their directions and thus, we can no longer reconstruct the leaves' 3-D locations. Thus, there is the optimal number of leaves for which we can get the largest amount of information. Determining this optimal number is an open problem.