Towards an Integrated Design Approach to Specknets

The Research Consortium in Speckled Computing is a multidisciplinary grouping of computer scientists, electronic engineers, physicists and electrochemists with the aim of realising wireless networks of miniature programmable speck devices. Each speck is designed to be autonomous with its own rechargeable battery and combines the capabilities to sense, process data and communicate wirelessly. This review paper outlines the unique multidisciplinary approach to the design of networks of specks and how the design of energy-efficient specks should take into account the intimate interactions between the different sub-systems which make up the specks, such as the energy source, wireless communication, physical layer design and the Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols.