Construction of a Remote Monitoring System in Smart Dust Environment

A smart dust monitoring system is useful for obtaining information on rough terrain that is difficult for humans to access. One of ways to deploy sensors to gather information in smart dust environment is to use an aircraft in the Amazon rainforest to scatter an enormous amount of small and cheap sensors (or smart dust devices), or to use an unmanned spacecraft to throw the sensors on the moon’s surface. However, scattering an enormous amount of smart dust devices creates the difficulty of managing such devices as they can be scattered into inaccessible areas, and also causes problems such as bottlenecks, device failure, and high/low density of devices. Of the various problems that may occur in the smart dust environment, this paper is focused on solving the bottleneck problem. To address this, we propose and construct a three-layered hierarchical smart dust monitoring system that includes relay dust devices (RDDs). An RDD is a smart dust device with relatively higher computing/communicating power than a normal smart dust device. RDDs play a crucial role in reducing traffic load for the system. To validate the proposed system, we use climate data obtained from authorized portals to compare the system with other systems (i.e., non-hierarchical system and simple hierarchical system). Through this comparison, we determined that the transmission processing time is reduced by 49%-50% compared to other systems, and the maximum number of connectable devices can be increased by 16-32 times without compromising the system’s operations.