M2M Magazine recently asked a number of questions of wireless sensor networking companies to determine the stage of the technology, issues that customers are facing, and outlook for future developments (such as standards). I participated in the Q&A with M2M on behalf of Moteiv, and our answers are featured as part of the supplement.
Participants included:
- Aether Wire
- Arch Rock
- Augusta Systems
- Cirronet
- Coronis Systems
- Crossbow Technology
- Dust Networks
- Eka Systems
- Ember
- Honeywell Sensing & Control
- MaxStream
- MeshNetics
- Millennial Net
- Moteiv
- Pedigree Technologies
- Sensicast Systems
- Tendril
The most common answer that isn't really an answer at all is "it depends on the application". It is true that I can't give you the radio range without knowing where you are deploying the system; however, mesh networking systems are supposed to alleviate the problems with the point-to-point radio range setup and configuration in older designs.
Battery power is another one of these metrics where it ranges anywhere from "we live forever!" to "a little while". I took a difference stance on the battery power question: Adopter's should always verify a vendor's claim about battery life by asking for the conditions under which the claim was made (such as "How often does each node send data?" and "What is the data latency?") and the type of battery that is used (D cells have much more power than AA cells and can sustain a longer lifetime at the expense of package size and cost). Battery life is always a frustrating thing for me to read about on competitors' websites. Sure, slapping the car battery on my tiny sensor mote will let it last 10 years, but is that really practical?
If you want the summary of what the participants are talking about (in my opinion!), here it is. I haven't included everyone, sorry.
- Arch Rock -- IP, IP, IP. Connect sensor networks with IP.
- Augusta Systems -- Management is a solved problem and we've got software for that.
- Coronis Systems -- Focus on automatic meter reading, cluster-tree apps with available backend infrastructure
- Crossbow Technology -- A general position that the "hard problems" have already been solved.
- Dust Networks -- We have reliability and low power and it is the best in the industry.
- Ember -- Metcalfe's Law. The value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes.
- Honeywell Sensing & Control -- Pushing ISA SP100 as the wireless standard.
- MaxStream -- Big focus on OEM support and integration.
- Sensicast Systems -- Solutions are easier to use with web technology like SOAP, REST, XML
- Tendril -- Anyone can use sensor networks. We got software for that.
Download the full reports from M2M Magazine >>
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Following on Texas Instrument's announcement of free IEEE 802.15.4 and Zigbee stacks, MeshNetics has released their IEEE 802.15.4 MAC through open source. The MeshNetics MAC runs on Atmel hardware including the Atmel Demo Board. As a trend, more and more MAC and Networking software is provided either with the hardware or as a free software download. Such open implementations assist in the adoption of standard wireless solutions, and are reducing the risk for customers to enter the wireless sensor market with unique solutions.
Read more about MeshNetics OpenMAC at the MeshNetics Website >>
Check out the SourceForge OpenMAC Project and Download the source code >>
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Texas Instruments has contacted us with the direct links to their software stack. Holding up their end of the deal, the software stacks are available for free from TI's website. TI is providing two separate stacks--a complete IEEE 802.15.4b-2006 stack and a complete Zigbee 2006 stack.
Texas Instruments Z-Stack - ZigBee Protocol Stack
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/z-stack.html >>
Texas Instruments TIMAC - IEEE802.15.4 Medium Access control (MAC) software stack
http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/timac.html >>
Enjoy!
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Texas Instruments announced that their Zigbee stack will no longer be sold as a separate license and instead is available for free. The networking stack is compliant with Zigbee 2006 (keep in mind that Zigbee 2006 is not inter-operable with Zigbee 2004 or Zigbee Pro). We applaud TI's decision to both release their stack for free without requiring additional licensing, and TI's reduction in cost for their development kits to attract a broader market to wireless sensing.
Although the stack is free, it does have a few restrictions. The TI Zigbee stack must be run on TI hardware. TI has not announced which third-party modules the software supports. Furthermore, a direct download link to the software is not readily available on the TI website.
Expect more companies to provide networking stacks for free as they become more and more commoditized. As we previously mentioned, Sensinode is offering a GPL open source stack for IETF's 6lowpan.
Read the full TI press release >>
If you're able to find the download link for public availability of TI's Zigbee stack, please send it to us at Moteiv.
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Sensinode, a startup in Europe, has released a GPL implementation of the proposed (and not yet final or standardized) IETF 6lowpan standard. Nanostack 0.9.4 only runs on the Sensinode hardware at this time, but shows promise of an open standards world where the protocols are accessible through open source.
The Nanostack 6lowpan implementation includes:
- IEEE 802.15.4 ad-hoc and beacon-mode support
- Automatic neighbor table
- 6lowpan implementation (draft-ietf-6lowpan-format-12)
- UDP, IPv6 and lowpan
- Routing table
- lowpan mesh routing support
- Includes a reference mesh routing algorithm
- All uncompressed fields
- Fragmentation
Read the Nanostack 0.9.4 press release >>
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Coming on the heels of the Contiki 2.0 release, they have posted instructions on how to get your Mac to run Contiki on Tmote Sky. The Mac support has always been difficult, but with the arrival of Intel processors, setting up a Mac-based development process has become easier.
Learn more about running Contiki 2.0 on Tmote Sky with a Mac
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After many months of waiting, Sun Labs has released their research platform for Java on wireless sensor devices. Called the "Sun SPOT", the hardware is extremely similar in capabilities to a cellular/mobile phone, without the display (180 MHz 32 bit ARM920T processor with 512KB RAM and 4MB of Flash). The SPOT includes a CC2420 radio, and researchers at Sun are working on cross-communication between the much lower power TinyOS nodes including Tmote Sky and the larger SPOT node.
The system is still experimental (dubbed "experimental technology from sun laboratories") and was designed to foster creative ideas for wireless sensor networks. Details about the kit, from the folks at Sun, include:
The first limited-production run of Sun SPOT Java Development Kits is now available for U.S. customers.*The Sun SPOT development kit includes everything needed to start developing applications for your Sun SPOT:
The development tools are compatible with Windows XP with Java runtime, PPC Mac OS X 10.4 or better and most common Linux distributions. In addition, the API specification for the initial release of the Sun SPOT libraries is available for preview.
- two complete Sun SPOT devices with demo sensor boards
- a base station Sun SPOT to connect to your development machine
- software development tools
- USB cable
Details about the system can be found at sunspotworld.com.
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Our friends at Telecom Italia / Pirelli in Berkeley are hiring interns for Summer 2007. The lab was started a year or so ago and has attracted some great individuals. More information is below:
Summer Internships at WSN Lab sponsored by Pirelli and Telecom Italia
- Modeling and optimization of the Zigbee protocol Stack
The project will require to model the ZigBee Protocol Stack in a Network Simulator environment. The simulator will be used to analyze:
- the portability of a node in the network (slow mobility);
- the impact of multiple applications on the performance of the network (information services, home automation applications, sensing and monitoring applications);
- the throughput performances in a ZigBee network.
As an output of the activity, it is expected a contribution to the ZigBee standard and in particular to the new Telecom Applications and Wireless Sensor Applications profiles.Desired knowledge and skills:
- experience with modeling in a network simulator environment
- ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stacks
- C/C++ expertise
- Implementation skills (script languages)- Optimization of Wireless Sensor Network Protocols
The goal of the project is to define a network optimization engine for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This engine should take into account the application requirements and identify the settings of the parameters of the protocol stack that optimize the network performances and the use of network resources. The project will require to define a constrained optimization problem for the parameters of the Zigbee protocol stack and develop techniques to solve it. As a first step, the optimization will focus on network layer parameters. Later it will be extended to parameters belonging to multiple layers of the stack.
Desired knowledge and skills:
- Background in optimization techniques and random processes
- Programming experience in a network simulator environment
- Programming experience in ns-2 and knowledge of Zigbee and IEEE 802.15.4 is preferred but not required.- Feature Extraction and Classification for Activity Monitoring using Body Sensor Networks
The goal of the project is to develop algorithms to determine the recurrent patterns in the sensor data for different actions including transition movements such as sit-to-stand, stand-to-lie for alert systems, and movements such as walking and running for localization. The data are collected by three-axis accelerometers and gyros placed in several parts of the person’s body. Recent work focuses on the analysis of the data in a single, mostly waist-mounted, triaxial accelerometer unit. This project will add more dimensions to the problem through the placement of sensors in multiple modalities and locations. The internship will require developing feature extraction and classification techniques, and identify patterns of activities of a person.
Background in data processing and statistics, and implementation skills are required.
If interested in applying for any of the above internships, please send your resume to:
- Marco Sgroi: marco.sgroi@wsnlabberkeley.com
- Sinem Ergen: sinem.ergen@wsnlabberkeley.comWireless Sensor Networks Lab sponsored by Pirelli and Telecom Italia
1995 University Ave. Suite 225
Berkeley, CA 94704
Tel: (510) 666-0174 ext. 101
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Wireless sensing was named one of the Top 25 ideas to ever emerge from the state of California by California Magazine as selected by the faculties of UC Berkeley and UCLA. Also included in the list are Google, the Simpsons, low-energy lightbulbs, and computer generated imagery (CGI). The article mentions our colleagues (and former advisors) from UC Berkeley and UCLA. Both motes and TinyOS are mentioned as technologies invented here in California.
Read the article at California Magazine >>
Last week wireless sensors were also touted by Business 2.0 and CNN as one of the "Top 8 Technologies to Save the World". Also of interest is nuclear waste neutralizers, which are featured as one of the other 7 technologies. The technologies promise to make the world a better place, while making entrepreneurs "green" too.
8 technologies to save the world >>
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Texas Instruments is showing videos and handing out flyers about Moteiv's FIRE project at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. If you are attending, but sure to stop by the Texas Instruments booth to check out all of their low power options. The exhibit is at South 2 26426E.
Here is an image of the flyer:
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I've fallen behind on my industry reading. In their November issue, Sensors Magazine named Moteiv's Tmote Invent system one of the top 50 products of 2006. The complete article is available here, the Tmote Invent is on page 9 Needless to say, I am very excited about this recognition, and I only wish that we were notified about it, rather than finding this information during a random internet surfing.
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One of the first transnational funding projects in Europe has recently announced recipients of the Application Enablers for Rapidly Developed Sensor Networks (AppSN) project. Three of the groups receiving funding are friends of Moteiv, including SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), the FU Berlin (Freie Universitat Berlin) and Scatterweb.
I visited Jochen Schiller at FU Berlin and Hartmut Ritter at Scatterweb earlier this year. They have a very interesting and powerful programming abstraction for wireless sensors that uses the Microsoft .NET framework. The system greatly eases the programming of wireless sensors devices. Some of the university work was spun out to Scatterweb, where Dr. Ritter is working on commercialization of the software and hardware technologies.
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Included in this post are a variety of news announcements from ISA Expo in Houston, TX.
Perpetuum releases vibration energy harvester
PMG17 is the next major breakthrough in vibration energy harvesting technology. The wireless and battery-free device is capable of generating useful energy from levels of vibration that are 35% lower than previously possible, and across a large bandwidth of vibration frequencies. OEMs, sensor manufacturers and end-users can benefit from using the generators to power easy-to-install devices that accurately monitor machinery and processes such as the condition of plant equipment.
Honeywell offers 'wireless cloud' at MCAA
Industrial wireless users already take the technology for granted--testimony to its reliability--and those not yet using wireless are hesitant for the usual reasons.
Honeywell offers wireless cloud at ISA
Alliance head sees rapid growth in wireless
ZigBee The chairman of the ZigBee Alliance expects shipments of ZigBee wireless technology chips to double this year, compared to 2005, and increase fivefold in 2007.
'Ask me about ISA-SP100'
The lapel buttons that pronounce, "Ask me about ISA-SP100," referring to the ISA wireless committee and standard, were pinned on people walking the EXPO floor here at the Reliant Center in Houston.
Wireless is everywhere. Peter Fuhr jokingly said, "100% of the display booths on the show floor have wireless phones." That is a safe bet.
More about the SP100 work at ISA
Nanotron and ST Team on Wireless Sensors
STMicroelectronics, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies, and Nanotron Technologies GmbH (Nanotron) today announced a definitive, non-exclusive agreement under which the two companies will jointly develop complete solutions for the Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) market. These solutions offering robust communication, precision ranging, and high-accuracy positioning, will operate on emerging low-data rate networks that meet the recently begun efforts to establish a low-data-rate wireless personal area network (IEEE 802.15.4a) standard.
Oil & gas, wireless propel business growth for ISA exhibitors
Fueled in part by growth in oil and gas industries--despite lower oil prices--plus demand for new communications systems, including wireless technologies, exhibitors at ISA EXPO 2006 said they are enjoying generally positive business growth.
Oil and gas use wireless at ISA
HART talks wireless
One of HART's key challenges is "getting industry out of the box they've been in with respect to HART being part-time, and recognizing the value of integrated systems and what they can do for the plant," said Ron Helson, HART Communication Foundation executive director.
More information about Wireless HART at ISA
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SP100 is a new standard being developed for industrial wireless sensor networking. As part of the ISA, SP100 is one of many industrial standards emerging from the organization. Next week, there will be a meeting of SP100 members held in conjunction with ISA's annual conference, ISA Expo. In this article, I'll recap the current activities of SP100 prior to the meeting next week.
The first official SP100 meeting, a teleconference, was held on April 20, 2005. Two groups were formed--SP100.14 to standardize low power wireless sensor devices and SP100.11 to standardize higher bandwidth wireless infrastructure and backbones. The work accomplished by the group from April 2005 through July 2006 culminated in two major documents, the SP100.14 Request for Proposals and the SP100.11 Request for Proposals.
Notification of intent to submit proposals was due in late August, and proposers presented slides on the ideas behind their proposals at a meeting in Raleigh, NC from September 6-8. At this meeting, the following companies presented their ideas for SP100 (some only attacked a single layer of the OSI model, while others addressed all layers): Analog Devices, Adaptive Instruments, AIN, Apprion, Certicom, Crossbow, Dust Networks, Emerson, GE Global Research, Machine Talker, Nanotron, Newtrax, OMNEX, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Sensicast, Siemens, ST, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, and Yokogawa.
Although such a large number of companies proposed methods for the SP100 specification, many of the ideas were extremely similar. Over the past month since this meeting, the proposers have aligned themselves into a few major groups. Below I'll detail each of these groups and the key points of their proposals. Keep in mind that these observations are my personal opinion--please contact me with any omissions or corrections.
WNSIA: Otherwise known as "Wireless Network for Secure Industrial Applications". The group is led by Honeywell with members including 3eTI, Adaptive Instruments, Crossbow, Endress+Hauser, Flowserve, Omnex Controls, and Yokogawa. WNSIA proposes a primary network of 802.11 based routers with wireless sensors communicating with routers in a star topology. Both the mesh 802.11 backbone and wireless sensors communicate using TDMA schedules. Of note is WNSIA's proposal to use proprietary radios for the wireless sensors; specifically narrow band 2.4GHz frequency hoppers. This PHY proposal has been called into question by other members of SP100 on the basis of interoperability and coexistence, two items that all IEEE radios must adhere to for standardization.
Emerson/Dust: Emerson and Dust are proposing a full mesh wireless sensor solution based on Dust's TSMP (time synchronized mesh protocol). The protocol operates above the IEEE 802.15.4 PHY at 2.4GHz and assigns all communication into TDMA time slots. The scheduling is centrally controlled, so any change in the environment or location of a sensor requires a new schedule to be computed and disseminated from server to nodes. The Emerson/Dust proposal is the only proposal that actually uses a full-mesh architecture (albeit centrally controlled) instead of a star, tree, or cluster-tree architecture. A whitepaper on TSMP can be downloaded from Dust.
Sensicast/STG/GE: Sensicast's network architecture is similiar to Dust's, with the exception that they offload some of the work to be computed distributedly by the nodes. The system is set up as a cluster-tree, with router nodes communicating in a tree back to gateways. End nodes communicate with routers in a star topology, with communication slots distributedly assigned by the routers. Of primary note, in my opinion, are the concepts that STG brings to the group. STG proposes "sensor network tunnels", a way for sensor data to traverse one side of a sensor network to the other by first going to a gateway, tunneling through the IP infrastructure, and then popping out the other side back into the sensor network--an idea that utilizes the backbone network (which has power and provisioning) much more effectively. GE lends their security model to the group, which is the onerous of the proposals due to the fact that it does not require SP100 members to license any technology to adhere to the proposed security standard. On the other hand, GE's security is not fully distributed and is not as comprehensive as the proposal presented by Certicom.
Siemens: Okay, so Siemens isn't a group but rather their own single entity. The Siemens proposal has the best of all worlds--sometimes we might need the performance of a star topology and sometimes we might need the versatility of a mesh topology. The result is a proposal with "Advanced Performance" and "Advanced Mesh" modes for network operation. What is undefined in the proposal is how I can deploy a network with both characteristics; commissioning and deploying a hybrid performance/mesh network seems phenomenally useful in the harsh industrial monitoring environments, but this notion has not yet been resolved in presentations or whitepapers.
Summary: Despite the variety of architectures proposed, there is a few common themes that almost every entity proposed. These include:
- IEEE 802.15.4 2.4GHz PHY and MAC because IEEE has already done the work of making sure it works well with others.
- Adaptive Frequency Hopping (or AFH for short). All proposers included frequency hopping as part of their proposals, showing how important this technique is for achieving high reliability when using lossy wireless links.
- Both TDMA and CSMA/CA networks were proposed, but the compromise appears to be an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC with modifications to the GTS (guaranteed time slots) mechanism to support AFH from the previous bullet. This would provide for a short contention period followed by pre-assigned slotted communication. Almost all proposals included a TDMA element.
- No dominant security and authentication architecture has emerged. Proposals with significant technical merit require IP licensing, whereas proposals that use unlicensed technology are not as comprehensive for all aspects of authentication.
Comments or questions should go to joe at moteiv.com. See you in Houston.
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It looks like there is a new site focusing on wireless sensor network news. We are featured in stories on the Discovery Channel segment on FIRE and the CNN segment on FIRE.
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SAP's Ike Nassi answered some questions about the future of research at SAP, the impact of RFID and wireless sensors, and how SAP is building software to help their customers.
I was encouraged by the fact that SAP is not looking at these systems as "data monitoring" systems but rather as event-driven systems that let humans know when they need to do something:
Q: These sensors and RFID devices will generate huge amounts of data. How will companies handle that?A: One topic in our research group is event-enabling some of these things. As the data comes in, you want to only be notified of exceptional conditions, not the normal stuff. You only want to know the stuff that humans have to deal with.
Read the full article at CRM News
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The guys at Sun Labs have programmed up their Sun SPOTS nodes to create interactive art in Downtown San Jose. The group deployed wireless nodes in hotel rooms with infrared detectors. By pointing an infrared beam from the park below, you can cause each hotel room to light up or turn dark. Although the details of the system are very vague, often the most interesting applications are the ones the designers never imagined.
http://news.com.com/Art+blends+real,+virtual+worlds/2100-11392_3-6105881.html
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Many people have asked "what is the difference between RFID and wireless sensor networks?" or "what can WSNs do that RFIDs can't?". The question has come up enough times that I figure it is best that we respond.
Rather than give you my own, biased spin on the matter, below is a brief excerpt from Frost & Sullivan's research report.
In many ways RFID can be considered as a predecessor to wireless sensor networks. RFID enables automatic monitoring of 'tags' and is used in applications such as inventory tracking and management, and automatic logging.The main components of an RFID system are a base station or a receiving station. This station reads the RFID tags. A RFID tag incorporated in a chip or an integrated circuit. Tags can be classified as passive or active depending upon whether they are self-powered (deriving their energy from the radio waves) or battery powered. Most of the tags that are attached to supermarket items as antitheft devices are passive tags and derive their power by converting the alternating radio wave energy to a constant DC (direct current) energy. When the tag is bought in close proximity to the base station, data is read from it and further programmed actions are taken depending on the data read.
With the current technology, tag prices have reached rock bottom prices and each tag can cost as low as 10 cents. Maximum range from where tags can be read varies between 1 in. to 18 in.. Some RFID tags available in the market also have integrated temperature sensors. Hence, this technology could be considered as a stepping stone to the increasingly popular wireless sensors networks technology. However, most RFID systems available today are input/output systems that require human intervention. Wireless sensor networks have the ability to be truly ubiquitous as they integrate the physical world with the cyberspace, providing a host of data that can be used for enhanced living and better productivity in commercial applications.
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MaxStream, makers of 900MHz and 2.4GHz wireless RF modules, has been acquired for $38.5 million by Digi International. Digi makes embedded consoles and devices, and MaxStream seems to be a natural fit. The deal was split half cash and half stock. Based in Lindon, Utah and employing 49 people, MaxStream generated $10.4 million in revenue and $1.3 million in net income, or 12.7% of revenue, in the year ending December 31, 2005. Digi trades with ticker DGII on Nasdaq.
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Over the summer months, vacations cut into the pace of press releases and industry announcements and thus a slowdown in the pace of wireless sensor innovations. In this post, a few articles of interest over the past two weeks.
Honeywell announces wireless sensor strategy
Another article on volcano monitoring using Moteiv's Tmote Sky
Microsoft Research to unveil SensorMap on July 17
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Last week I attended Sensors Expo in Chicago, amongst other things. Although Sensors Magazine gives out some awards for this and that, I walked the floor and found something that really interested me. As opposed the hype around wireless and automotive at the conference, my interest was in an actual sensor.
Analog Devices was showing off their new iSensor platform. The iSensor series is an awesome step forward for the industry because it reduces the amount of domain expertise that I need in order to package together a solution for the customer. ADI was showing their MEMs gyroscope. The cool part about it is the gyroscope is digitally controlled for frequency response, sample rate, and range scaling. What used to be provided as three separate accelerometers, soldered to three PCBs at 90 degree angles, then painfully calibrated and packaged, is now available as a single surface mount part. This makes sensor integration for wireless application companies much simpler. I encourage you to check it out, more information is available here:
http://www.analog.com/en/content/0,2886,764%255F%255F103233,00.html
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Ember announced that they raised an additional $12m of venture capital bringing their grand total to $65m of total investment. Vulcan and Polaris participated in this round.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0,39020348,39275133,00.htm
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D.K Arvind (University of Edinburgh), Roger Meike (Research Director, Sun Labs), and Richard Newton (Dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley) will be part of a presentation at the Computer History Museum on June 5. The reception starts at 6 and features wine from the Mountain Winery. The presentation will be held at Hahn Auditorium in Mountain View (directions).
To register or for more information on the event, please visit the Museum's Web site at http://www.computerhistory.org/wireless_06052006 or Call (650) 810-1005.
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This entry recaps some of the events over the past few weeks and a look forward to upcoming events.
Upcoming:
May 30 & 31, there will be a panel at Emnets in Boston called "Show me the money" discussing the opportunities for wireless sensor startups. Dr. Joe Polastre (me) is on the panel as well as Rob Poor, former CTO from Ember, and Jay Werb, CTO at Sensicast.
May 25, Dr. David Culler, who advised two of the Moteiv founders at UC Berkeley, is speaking at the monthly wireless sensor network SIG in San Jose
May 31, Chris Peterson, the Chief Wharfinger at the Port of Oakland, discusses their RFID rollout for monitoring and tracking containers. The talk will be held in San Jose.
News:
Boeing and FedEx are testing active RFID tags for tagging airplane parts on FedEx jets. From Ken Porad, program manager at Boeing, "If we can use active tags on flights, that sets the stage to begin deploying wireless sensor networks, in which things like temperature sensors could be attached to the tags and used to monitor perishable goods in transit." Unfortunately RFID and wireless sensor networks are terms that are commonly interchanged in the media.
DHS is asking companies to submit proposals by May 30th for securing America's borders with innovative technology.
Sun showed off their SunSPOTS platform, a 32-bit hefty mote with similar capabilities to Intel's iMote2, at the JavaOne conference here in San Francisco last week.
Crossbow has partnered with Honeywell for sensing and control applications. The press release doesn't mention specific target applications or when a product will be announced/released/available.
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(Written during Wireless Ventures Day 1, Wednesday May 3 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose)
Today is mostly focused on cellular wireless networks and where the next big wins will be. In that vein, the remainder of this blog will be focused primarily on the cellular wireless market.
An interesting comment from the opening session was the room for expansion and possibly very profitable ventures that take advantage of people that are "filling time", for example when you're waiting at the airport, on the train, in line, etc. This especially appeals to me, as I spend a ton of time each day idle on the Muni train to and from work. I'd like to be more productive during that time, and current cell phones and even smartphones don't address the problem (one issue brought up was that current phones are fairly bad at displaying CRM systems in a useful way). Other uses of free time are obviously games, IM, and other things that Nokia's Ngage and Nintendo's DS try to leverage.
RIM is focusing on making the mental leap from lots of information to what is important. The importance in this is (surprise!) CRM applications, BUT it has a nice parallel to wireless sensors. RIM is worried that people can't view what they need on a small display in a meaningful way because of all the clutter that is part of the conventional web applications. Instead, they just want the customer detail in the CRM. The analogy to sensor networks is that both environments have to deal with more data than the eyeball can possibly handle. A big win will come from the companies that can extract the useful data effectively and present it to end users.
Biggest issue for Walt Disney's mobile division is porting and quality assurance. They need to get their content, games, etc on at least 200 different handsets to reach a large enough market. For Pirates of the Caribbean online content launching later this year, their mobile applications required 12 months of hard effort porting to each of the different cellular handset platforms. Ivan Lopez, director of business development for the North American Mobile Studios at Disney, directly asked the audience to develop and market a solution that enables cross platform content development in a way that reduces or eliminates porting and doesn't require excruciating q/a on every single platform.
Stay tuned for Day 2 results, which will include updates on players in the Wireless Sensor industry including Sensicast, Tendril, Wireless Seismic, and how VCs are perceiving the wireless market.
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This week has been active in the field of wireless sensors. Instead of individual posts, lets summarize the developments in one long post instead.
Everyone is talking about Ember doubling their engineering staff in Cambridge to support increased development for Zigbee silicon. Although nice to know they're hiring, this is not very surprising since Ember is now competing head to head with Motorola (Freescale) and Texas Instruments (Chipcon). Fighting the established regime is tough, hopefully they'll ditch the XAP2 and integrate a nice easy-to-use architecture that simply blows the doors off everyone else (hint, ember, you need to exceed the specs of your competitors, not match them, to be on the "cutting edge"). You can read the press release at Ember's site, but I think one of the most interesting articles about the expansion announcement was from a little-known wireless journal in the UK:
http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/2683
On Monday, May 1, Tendril announced their first product to interact with data from Zigbee networks in the building control market. Although we're not yet sure what it does, it definitely wins the award for longest product name ever. Called "The Tendril Bridge for Building Automation Powered by Tridium's NiagaraAX Framework", it allows you to integrate Zigbee data to an Echelon control system using the Zigbee vendor of your choice--but currently they only support Ember. Other vendors are soon to come. See their press release to get the details.
Realizing that the oil and gas industry is making record profits (meaning more money to spend), Honeywell announced an industrial monitoring system using wireless. The motivation is cutting costs and reducing downtime, great quantifiable benefits (ROI) of using wireless sensors and a great boost to the industry. There's a bit of marking mixed in there too: they're expanding into wireless sensors and "hope to unite the data with the business value for the customer to create a complete solution". More info:
http://www.itp.net/business/features/details.php?id=4302&category=
Boeing is using WiFi to improve the production process. Although WiFi is a good immediate solution, I worry about the scalability of how to locate thousands of airplane parts while not running out of battery. Boeing is worried about how to manage all of the data coming in from the location system, a problem experience by numerous wireless users and even our own customers.
http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int&id=3136
PCWorld has published an article about the "Invasion of Wireless Sensors" in the consumer space. The misnamed article has nothing really to do with wireless sensors but rather with robotics and cell phones. Everyone has jumped on the "wireless sensor" bandwagon.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125552,00.asp
The previously mentioned "Lover's Cups" in our blog is in the news again. You can read an updated view of the project from the Boston Herald (they presented the devices at CHI at the end of April).
http://theedge.bostonherald.com/lifeNews/view.bg?articleid=137290
I'll be at the Dow Jones Wireless Ventures conference for the rest of the week with another blog update about the newest, coolest wireless companies at the end of the week.
Finally, a number of folks have asked for direct links to the RSS feeds for our blog. To facilitate your RSS reading, I've posted the RSS feed links to the right side of the Main Moteiv Blog for your convenience.
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Although not 100% sensor networks, mesh networking has been proposed for numerous other uses including metro-mesh 802.11 wireless access. IEEE 802.11s is an attempt to standardize mesh networking for 802.11-based systems providing the backbone in city-wide wireless deployments. Unclear how 802.11s will fare compared to 802.16 (otherwise known as WiMAX) for metropolitan wireless Internet access, but of curious concern is how 802.11s will treat the power consumption aspect.
The main news around IEEE 802.11s is the deal struck by rival agendas to produce a single specification, similar to the recent developments in the 802.11n working group. Because they put aside their differences, 802.11n is available to consumers sooner with products from D-Link and Linksys announced recently.
If you can't figure out this whole alphabet soup of 802.11* and 802.16* protocols, don't worry because you're not alone. Thankfully, Wikipedia can help you with all of your 802.11/802.11n/802.11s and 802.16 needs.
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http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/msp430fg4618.html
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Texas Instruments reported their Q1 2006 earnings recently. I have finally had time to read the report, and of interest is their increased focus on wireless. Two substantial notes from their report:
- The Chipcon acquisition, which everyone knows about by now
- Revenue from semiconductors used in wireless applications was even sequentially and was up 32 percent from a year ago.
The second point is a reassuring sign that wireless applications are growing in importance to TI's business.
Moteiv is a Texas Instruments Third Party Network member and promoter of TI's products, specifically their microcontrollers and Chipcon radios, for wireless sensor applications.
Read the full TI earnings report.
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The microcontroller market is currently a 10 billion unit market. What is particularly interesting is that Bourne hypothesizes that small niche applications could become as lucrative as large volume applications.
This report comes on the heels of the announcement that the semiconductor industry had a record $235 billon of sales in 2005, up from $223 billion, the previous record set in the dot-com boom of 2000.
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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is proposing a standard for a Sensor Observation Service (SOS) that would tie data together from remote, in-situ, and mobile sensor networks for GIS. It also specifies the filtering of data and utilizes OGC's other proposed specification, SensorML, to describe the data. They are requesting comments and feedback on the proposed specification.
From the OGC Website:
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is contemplating adoption of a technology called OpenGIS Sensor Observation Service (SOS). OGC invites public comment on a candidate specification that will soon be presented for approval by OGC members as an OpenGIS Implementation Specification. The purpose of this Request for Public Comment (RFPC) is to obtain comments on the proposal for technologies and needed interfaces required for OpenGIS Sensor Observation Service (SOS).
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The Embedded WiSeNts project in Europe has published a report on the future uses and challenges with Wireless Sensor Networks. Moteiv founders Joe Polastre and Rob Szewczyk participated in the 2005 Summer School on Wireless Sensor Networks and Smart Objects in Germany sponsored by Embedded WiSeNts. The organization also funds wireless sensor conferences, like EWSN, and funds 10 universities in Europe. The report calls out the need for middleware for wireless sensor applications.
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Sun is one of many software vendors to offer a RFID middleware software product and solution offerings around this middleware to deliver RFID end-to-end solutions to its customers.
Dr. Traversat discusses Sun overall RFID product vision, current Sun Java Systems RFID 3.0 product, and its experience deploying RFID solutions at customer sites.
http://www.wca.org/RFID_info.htm
Held at:
Duel Systems,
1750 Junction Ave. San Jose, CA 95112
10am to Noon, Wednesday April 5.
Update 4/5/2006: The presentation from Sun is now online at http://www.wca.org/RFID_info.htm. Very interesting description of Sun's use of RFID and wireless infrastructure.
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Certicom, a Canadian company, has just published a report on securing wireless sensor networks. Their method uses ECC, previously only available (under license) from Sun. The information is at a high level, not giving any details on how the system is architected, how trust is achieved, etc.