What are sensor networks good for? [LWN.net]

What are sensor networks good for?

Posted Jan 4, 2008 5:03 UTC (Fri) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211)
In reply to: What are sensor networks good for? by kbob
Parent article: Hardware Fun with the Arduino board

Classic examples of sensor nets include factories and warehouses. If you can just stick wireless sensors in place and let them self-organize a network, that's cheaper than wiring the place up ... and easier to repair, too, when a forklift accident damages something. (People being much harder to repair!)

My favorite example is ecological though. Small cheap sensors are spread throughout a forest ... at lots of different altitudes. You can study not just microclimates, but nanoclimates, and their relationships to forest health.

to post comments

What are sensor networks good for?

Posted Jan 12, 2008 0:35 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

As a random aside, Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ has a distant 
descendant of sensor networks (`localizers') play a significant part in 
the plot.

(But then Vinge *is* an ex-CS prof who writes his books in Emacs, so I 
guess it's not unusual that he knew about this sort of thing years before 
the rest of us spotted it... of course he's inspired the name of at least 
one program as well, GNU Mailman. Thankfully this one is rather less 
malevolent than Vinge's.)