Abstract

We propose Mote Herding, a new system architecture for large scale, heterogeneous sensor networks. Mote herding uses a mix of many 8-bit sensor nodes (motes) and fewer but more powerful 32-bit sensor nodes (microservers). Mote herding groups motes into flocks that are connected via a multihop network to a microserver acting as a shepherd. Shepherds exploit their greater communications and compute power to form an overlay network, with many flocks joining to form a herd. By keeping each flock small and utilizing several shepherds, the herd can support many nodes with better latency, reliability, and energy efficiency than homogeneous architectures.

Date

December 17, 2025

Authors

Thanos Stathopoulos, Lewis Girod, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin