WISPs, Computational RFID and the Internet of Things

March 22, 2011
David J. Wetherall | University of Washington

Passive UHF RFID technology can be used to create computing platforms that are small, cheap, and long-lived. The devices that are now emerging have the potential to embed sensing, computation and communication deeply into the physical world to realize truly ubiquitous computing applications. This vision goes well beyond traditional sensor networks and is sometimes called the Internet of Things; the technology to enable it is sometimes called computational RFID.

In this talk, I will describe the progress we have made towards this vision over the past few years. I will describe: a prototype RFID tag called the WISP with sensors, storage, and an ultra-low power microcontroller that harvests its operating power from RF signals; a highly flexible companion RFID reader built using software-defined radio (SDR); and sample ubiquitous computing applications. It is challenging to develop applications for this new domain because of harsh constraints such as intermittent power and asymmetric connectivity. I will describe an energy-aware runtime we have developed, and RFID protocols suited to sensing that we are developing, to meet these challenges.

This is joint work with Joshua Smith, Alanson Sample, Dan Yeager, Michael Buettner, Ben Greenstein, and Polly Powledge of the University of Washington and Intel Labs. The WISP tag and SDR reader covered in the talk are available as open-source and are in use by over three dozen groups in the research community.

Speaker Details

David Wetherall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, former Director of nearby Intel Labs Seattle from 2006-9, and author of Computer Networks (5th edition) with Tanenbaum. His research mixes blue sky projects with industrial collaborations and is broadly focused on network systems, especially wireless networks and mobile computing, network measurement and the design of Internet protocols, and privacy and security. Wetherall’s research on Internet mapping received the Bennett Prize in 2004. His thesis research pioneered active networks, an architecture in which new network services can be introduced using mobile code, and received the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award in 2007. Wetherall has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and a B.E. in electrical engineering from the University of Western Australia. He became a Sloan Fellow in 2004 and was recognized with an NSF CAREER award in 2002.