Sensor Sensibility
… For smart dust to be useful engineers must figure out how to build a global view from the information provided by millions or billions of individual sensors.
For example, suppose that agricultural researchers scatter a million battery-powered, smart-dust sensors by helicopter to monitor water levels across a cornfield. Without knowing where each sensor has landed, how would the researchers determine whether the sensors’ combined range leaves gaps? Or imagine that engineers have deployed a sensor network to keep track of boats in a harbor. If each sensor reports how many boats it detects, how can the engineers keep an accurate tally without knowing how many sensors have counted the same boat?
To tackle these questions and others, researchers are drawing on techniques from topology, the study of shapes. Analyzed by mathematicians for more than a century, topology has until recently had few real-world applications.
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