An Asynchronous Wireless Network for Capturing Event-Driven Data from Large Populations of Autonomous Sensors

Abstract: We introduce a wireless RF network concept for capturing sparse event-driven data from large populations of spatially distributed autonomous microsensors, possibly numbered in the thousands. Each sensor is assumed to be a microchip capable of event detection in transforming time-varying inputs to spike trains. Inspired by brain information processing, we have developed a spectrally efficient, low-error rate asynchronous networking concept based on a code-division multiple access method. We characterize the network performance of several dozen submillimeter-size silicon microchips experimentally, complemented by larger scale in silico simulations. A comparison is made between different implementations of on-chip clocks. Testing the notion that spike-based wireless communication is naturally matched with downstream sensor population analysis by neuromorphic computing techniques, we then deploy a spiking neural network (SNN) machine learning model to decode data from eight thousand spiking neurons in the primate cortex for accurate prediction of hand movement in a cursor control task.