On a practical approach to low-cost ad hoc wireless networking

Abstract

Although simple wireless communication involving nodes built of microcontrollers and radio devices from the low end of the price spectrum is quite popular these days, one seldom hears about serious wireless networks built from such devices. Most of the commercially available nodes for ad hoc networking (somewhat inappropriately called "motes") are in fact quite serious computers with megabytes of RAM and rather extravagant resource demands. We show how one can build practical ad hoc networks using the smallest and cheapest devices vailable today. In our networks, such devices are capable of sustaining swarm-intelligent sophisticated routing while offering enough processing power to cater to complex applications involving distributed sensing and monitoring.