Collective Communication for Dense Sensing Environments

Intelligent Environments are currently implemented with standard WSN technologies using conventional connection-based communications. However, connection-based communications may impede progress towards IE scenarios involving high mobility or massive amounts of sensor nodes. We present a novel approach based on collective transmission for item level tagging using printed organic electronics, which implements robust, collective, approximate read-out of large numbers of simple tags. Our approach uses mechanisms for calculation by simultaneous transmission. We detail the collective transmission approach, discuss its implementation in the organic printed label scenario, and show first results of experiments conducted with our smart label test bed. We conclude with an outlook on the potential of collective transmission, and argue that collective transmission is a fundamental building block for realizing distributed intelligence.