3 ms·
What's the "chaotic oscillator" doing here? It sounds like they're listening to a room of people who each shout when their individual random number comes up, a
by mLuby 5y ago
What's the "chaotic oscillator" doing here?
It sounds like they're listening to a room of people who each shout when their individual random number comes up, as opposed to having some consensus protocol (don't say the B word). In other words, it's a way of doing random sampling?
- georgeoliver 5y agoI think the oscillator is a 'cheap' (low cost/energy) way of reporting the measurement. Since they're sampling the set of frequencies emitted by the oscillators it seems like they also could just encode the measurement as a frequency, but presumably that would involve more processing/energy/cost.
- docfort 5y agoChaos is useful because (1) the output depends heavily on the precise input, and (2) the output spectrum is unique for each input value, so the transmissions interfere with exceptionally low probability. Think of them as hashing functions, mapping an input value to many output bits distributed evenly across some bit range. If you encoded the measurement as a frequency, and realizing that the frequency will have some finite bandwidth, nearby sensors with almost the same value will obscure each other. If I want to get an accurate estimate of the mean measurement, counting the number of very similar input values is critical. You can, of course, have the transmit frequency equal to some scaled version of the measurement plus a transmitter ID frequency. While this doesn’t require any dynamic negotiation to avoid interference, it does consume more bandwidth than the chaotic oscillator case.