Bridging the digital with the physical world is made feasible through a proposed system architecture utilizing recent developments in cooperative beam-forming, RFIC technology and spread-spectrum techniques. In the proposed system, nodes will have to be activated only when they are triggered to send their own data to the fusion centre, without burdening the network with MAC layer collisions and energy-consuming routing algorithms, thus guaranteeing long lifetime cycles. Due to the simplicity of the node architecture that is used to implement the proposed system, the cost, size and energy consumption of the nodes can finally justify the use of the term ‘smart dust’.