Technology always advances, and in most areas the rate of change is also increasing all the time. But there are some areas where technological changes either happen only slowly, or even go into reverse. Not something we’re used to in computer science, but it’s a feature of sensor network programming: what are the challenges that technology won’t solve for us?
Sensor networks are all about uncertainty: if the sensor says it’s 20°C out there, then it might be 20°C plus-or-minus half a degree or so (limited precision); or it might be some different temperature, and the sensor’s just reported a duff value for some reason (limited accuracy). By contrast, computers most definitely aren’t about uncertainty, a fact enshrined in the famous maxim “garbage in, garbage out”. What does this mean for our ability to build really large, robust and flexible sensor networks?
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Text and other content copyright (c) Simon Dobson, 2010. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
