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Please check out our new website and company focus at www.sentilla.com A recent article has been published that talks about wireless location tracking. Location is often referred to as the "holy grail" for wireless solutions since it allows motes to be deployed in a truly ad-hoc manner. There are multiple methods for figuring out where a mote is--the most commonly used method is GPS. GPS chipsets have significantly advanced in the last 10 years, where the power consumption is low and the accuracy is very high. Integrating GPS with motes is more commonplace and provides a very good solution for outdoor deployments with a clear view of the sky. For indoor situations, the options are less abudant and less accurate. Companies like Rosum offer location positioning based on TV signals, but these only work well in metropolitan areas. Why is that a problem? Well, as the article points out, determining the location of a person in burning building or a mine is not possible using traditional techniques. Instead, the motes must rely on each other to figure out their location. This approach is the most difficult, the least accurate, but has extremely promising uses. We're constantly tracking the new location technologies that are coming on to the market. Some companies are proposing ultra-wideband which uses a slew of different frequencies to address the issues with a single signal bouncing around like in the case of WiFi. But the most fundamental is to measure and calibrate the strength of signal received from other motes. Basically each mote listens to its neighbors and then computes the distance based on how loud its neighbors are talking. Not very accurate, but sometimes knowing within 10-20m where someone is located is more than enough to rescue them from a dangerous situation.
This notion is not infeasible or science fiction; Professor Kerop Janoyan at Clarkson University in New York is leading a project to monitor bridges in upstate New York using wireless sensors based on Moteiv's technology. He has designed a system that monitors acceleration and vibration in all dimensions, analyzes the data, transmits it wirelessly using Moteiv's Tmote Sky module. Strain gauges are also used; they can alert authorities of significant deformations in the bridge's structure that may lead to collapse. Strain gauges are also commonly used to monitor the integrity of pillars in mines to detect the possibility of collapse before such an event occurs. (Gory details about strain gauges and how they work are available at wikipedia). An article on the system appears online at EETimes and Professor Janoyan's webpage includes an overview of the system. An older article was written and published by Clarkson University.
This weekend, Moteiv moved our world headquarters from downtown San Francisco to downtown Redwood City. Our Redwood City facility is our new world headquarters effective Monday, July 23rd. We're excited about the new space, and we have lots of room to grow (and we're hiring, so please submit your resume!). With a huge increase in area over our former facility, Moteiv's new corporate headquarters has expanded facilities to build, test, and deploy wireless systems.
Important Information:
The Mobile & Embedded System research group at Yonsei University has released a new operating system for wireless sensors networks called "RETOS", Resilient, Extensible, and Threaded OS for Wireless Sensor Networks. Information about the operating system was published at this year's IPSN/SPOTS conference, where I was a member of the program committee. The initial release supports Moteiv's Tmote Sky modules. RETOS is a departure from the standard TinyOS framework that many know and love. It supports dynamically loadable modules (ala SOS from UCLA) and a multithreaded system allowing programmers to block on events instead of building complex state machines for asynchronous code. The July 4th holiday has passed and we're back from vacation. Over the past few weeks a number of articles have been written about Moteiv and the applications that we enable. First off, WiFi Planet published a great overview of what Moteiv has been up to and how we're leading the charge in the wireless sensor network market. In an article entitled "Moteiv: Better than Fairy Dust", Gerry Blackwell describes Moteiv's competencies and gives an overview of the wireless sensor network market. Read the full article at WiFi Planet >> ONWorld has been producing quality reports about the wireless sensor network market since 2003. ONWorld recently released a report about the use of wireless technologies in cities. Wireless sensor networks, of course, make cities safer, healthier, greener, and more productive. Featured in the description of the report is the firefighter safety project that Moteiv, UC Berkeley, and others worked on. PC World picked up the report and wrote their own mini review. The folks at ONWorld have been busy; they recently released a report on wireless sensor networks for green buildings. In other news, Elster Group acquired Coronis, a maker of wireless sensors for automated meter reading. Coronis claims to have 1.2 million wireless sensors in deployment. Elster describes themselves as the world leader in metering technology, so that acquisition is a good match for the two companies. And finally, a fun application is body sensor networks that monitor athletes. Imperial College London is showing off wireless sensors that can monitor our health and help train athletes. The system was used at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in the UK. The event has passed, but if anyone had a chance to check it out, please drop us an email.  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:
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, a fellow spin-out from the University of California, has raised their second round of funding. Arch Rock was founded by David Culler, the adviser of Rob Szewczyk and I while at UC Berkeley, and Wei Hong, a co-worker of ours from Intel Research. A number of other great UC Berkeley alumni are now at Arch Rock too. The funding announcement comes at the end of an 8-month drought of venture investment in wireless sensor networking companies. A couple of other WSN companies are now out searching for venture capital. The Arch Rock investment shows a commitment by investors to the potential of wireless sensing and validates the necessity of other players in the WSN ecosystem. Arch Rock is best known for their use of IP to connect from Internet networks to wireless sensor networks. Their solution eases the inter-networking of these systems, allowing users to run commands like 'ping', 'traceroute', and web services interfaces from a central gateway node. They also have spiffy webpages to access each sensor node. The system is built using TinyOS, to which both Arch Rock and Moteiv are active contributors. The $10m Series B round supports the company's R&D product roadmap as well as sales and marketing according to the press release. The round was an internal round, with all of the Series A participants involved--NEA, Shasta, and Intel Capital. Arch Rock has raised $15m total to date. Arch Rock's Primer Pack/IP is now shipping, which is a development kit to get started with Arch Rock's inter-networking suite. With $10m in the bank, we're excited that Arch Rock is a Moteiv customer and wish them the best of luck.
Read the Bandwave Technology press release (in Chinese) >> Visit www.bandwavetech.com or contact Bandwave at +886-2-8773-7133 United States customers and other international customers may contact Moteiv directly at www.moteiv.com or +1-415-692-0960.  Today, we're announcing the latest addition to our hardware line of products. Tmote Mini is the newest member of the Tmote product family. It is small, flexible, and designed for deployment. Code compatible with Tmote Sky, Tmote Mini is a direct transition path from development to deployment.
Why should you care about Tmote Mini? Here's a few reasons:
Tmote Mini Development Kits are available now at moteiv.com.
Learn more about Tmote Mini >>
The author shares Moteiv's vision--there's a section where the "computing revolution" is described as the ability to access information. Introduced is the "wireless-computing revolution", where information can be accessed anywhere at low cost. We, at Moteiv, take this one step further--not only can the information can be accessed anywhere, but can also provide information about anything, especially real world items, processes, and trends. Objects will talk to other objects, and people will interact as necessary. On page 11 of the special supplement, the authors talk about the work that Moteiv founders pioneered at UC Berkeley--the applications created for the DARPA NEST program. The article also includes a mention of Moteiv on the same page. Page 14 continues information about Moteiv, discussing the UCB system that leverages Moteiv technology to track firefighters. One of the concluding observations is a concern over what we will do with all of this sensor data; an astute observation and one that requires careful consideration. Other friends of ours are mentioned in the article, including Kris Pister and Matt Welsh. Fellow Berkeley startups Dust Networks and Arch Rock also get a shout-out. If you don't subscribe to the Economist, I recommend picking up a copy (although, most of the stores around my house in San Francisco actually did not carry the magazine). It provides a good overview of the promise of wireless for the outside audience that has not yet been introduced to the world of mesh networks and wireless sensors. Read the full article at The Economist (subscription required) >>
Read more about MeshNetics OpenMAC at the MeshNetics Website >> Check out the SourceForge OpenMAC Project and Download the source code >> 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 Texas Instruments TIMAC - IEEE802.15.4 Medium Access control (MAC) software stack Enjoy!
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.
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:
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
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.* Details about the system can be found at sunspotworld.com. The developers of Contiki have released the first version of the Contiki 2.x series. This is the first release of Contiki that supports our popular Tmote Sky modules. New features that are touted as part of the 2.0 release include:
Read more information about Contiki, and check out Contiki support for Tmote Sky.
Summer Internships at WSN Lab sponsored by Pirelli and Telecom Italia EasySen, LLC. has announced two new sensor boards compatible with Moteiv's Tmote Sky hardware platform. The WiEye sensor board is a low power, highly sensitive surveillance and security board that has the capability of detecting IR signatures from more than 100 feet distance. It has many unique features that allow for extremely low sampling rates and ''backdating'' of events. The SBT30EDU is a low price development board with a prototyping area, 3 integrated sensors, and connectivity to external devices. This versatile board is tailored to the needs of university labs and system developers.
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.
Their proposed solution is an environmentally powered wireless network of Tmote Sky nodes with corrosion sensors. The system is powered by a piezoelectric bimorph energy harvester with a power conditioning circuit. It operates at a 0.13% duty cycle, sending corrosion readings every 30 minutes. According to the authors, "Moteiv's Tmote Sky transceiver design requires the least amount of power to operate. In addition, the Moteiv transceiver met all of our requirements and was the lowest in cost." For more information, see the ASME website and look for paper IMECE2006-13381.
There are a number of other developments that we'll be announcing for our website and our products this year. We're excited to start the year off with a new look, because there are many exciting things being cooked up in Moteiv's World Headquarters that we can't wait to share with you. We started last year by becoming the first wireless sensor company to have a blog and promote what's going on in the industry. Moteiv welcomes a number of new faces to the company, and we intend to continue building out our killer team. If you've been looking for a job with a startup working on completely new, novel technology, please drop us a line. No email goes unanswered. Furthermore, if something is exciting to you in the sensor network arena, please send those suggestions to us too. Hope everyone had a happy new year, and here's to great strides forward for wireless sensors in 2007.
Posted by Joe Polastre on January 8, 2007 at 3:23 PM
Filed under: Applications Industry Moteiv Tmote Sky 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:
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. 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. 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:
Comments or questions should go to joe at moteiv.com. See you in Houston. In addition to the videos on the Discovery Channel and CNN, the FIRE project from UC Berkeley and Moteiv has been written up by a number of different websites and journals. Below are links to articles about the FIRE project. RFID Journal Bill Koslosky's Blog Gadgetnutz Sensors Magazine
If you missed the Discovery Channel or CNN broadcasts, the videos are now available on YouTube and embedded into this blog post.
The CNN video can be viewed in its full definition via the CNN website at: Check the YouTube videos at:
WIRED NextFest 2006: Intelligent Fire Information and Rescue Equipment (FIRE) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFky26RedOM
On CNN and CNN Headline News:
On CNN USA: Friday 11A-12P, 2-3P Saturday 10-11A, 4-5P Sunday 9-10A On CNN Headline News Friday 6:30-7A, 11-11:30A, 6-7P Saturday 9:30-10A, 12:30-1P Sunday 8-8:30A, 1-1:30P
The full television schedule for the NextFest 2006 show is available at the Science Channel TV Listings and Discovery Channel TV Listings. The show will air on the following channels at these times (check local listings or TiVo it!) Science Channel Discovery Channel 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?
 Moteiv announces the release of Boomerang 2.0.4 that includes numerous bug fixes and additions from the previous Boomerang releases. Notable changes in 2.0.4 include:
For a full list of changes, view: http://www.moteiv.com/community/Boomerang_ChangeLog Boomerang can be downloaded for free from Moteiv
The University is using Tmote Sky motes in their prototype system, which can be seen in the video. To view the segment, fast forward to 4:40 into the video below:
http://news.com.com/Art+blends+real,+virtual+worlds/2100-11392_3-6105881.html In a follow up to last week's discussion of smart vineyards, Texan and Israeli scientists are building wireless irrigation sensing systems. By monitoring the leaf temperatures, water can be conserved while preventing the crop from being exposed to extreme temperature. Cotton is used as the example in the story. http://www.axcessnews.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=10822 Wineries in Northern California are testing systems that provide detailed microclimate, irrigation, and health data about their vines. By using technology, wine makers are controlling the size and growth of their crop, measuring acidity and salinity, and irrigating more effectively and efficiently. A group at UC Davis showed a smart irrigation system using Moteiv's motes that opens and closes an electronic valve based on the surrounding soil moisture content. Nodes compute the available water content and turn on and off irrigation valves to achieve consistent growth. An article in Fortune (reprinted at cnn.com) talks about the science and technology being introduced to winemaking. Tmote Sky, our very popular platform for developing wireless sensor applications, is featured in the recent Embedded WiseNets report that details numerous platforms, operating systems, and other capabilities available for wireless sensor application development. Thanks to our good friends in Europe for adding Tmote Sky to their list. To download the full report, fill out the form at the Embedded WiseNets website. Our good friends over at Tendril have completed their Series B round ($5.25m) and have hired Adrian Tuck, former VP at Ember, to be their new CEO. Tim Enwall, their former CEO, will now be COO. Tim is a Cal alumni and friend of Moteiv. 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. 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.
Last year, I published a paper in Sensys about A Unifying Link Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks. I also wrote a dissertation on the subject. This link abstraction, that I called SP or Sensornet Protocol, is the primary communications abstraction in Moteiv's Boomerang product.
Since writing two implementations of SP, a number of network protocols, and investigating different link layer technologies, I have some observations about the usefulness of each of the concepts presented in the original paper. In this entry, I will summarize what I've found useful, what is probably not necessary, and what I'd like to see in the future.
To summarize: Critical to support: Message pool, message futures, neighbor table schedule information, reliability control and feedback, timestamping, abstract data types and non-direct accessing of structure field, non-buffer passing receive interfaces Don't get too caught up with: Link estimation, Urgent/Priority May not be completely useful: Congestion, Naming Haven't found a need for yet: Phase/Delay feedback Iowa State is developing a system of wireless sensors that monitoring America's power infrastructure. Although primarily for security, they can also help in response to disasters and storms that bring down power lines. 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 Our good friend Matt Welsh appears in an article about volcano monitoring that was previously featured on the front page of Moteiv's website. Matt and his team at Harvard deployed a system using Tmote Sky to monitor seismic activity and infrasound (low frequency) vibrations. Details about the project, although with some technical inaccuracies, are included in the article from Network World. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/062606widernet-volcano.html 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
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0,39020348,39275133,00.htm An undergraduate student from Boston University has designed a smart trash can using motes that can detect if a public trash can is full or empty. Just yesterday I walked past an overflowing trash can with garbage spread all over the street and thought "why doesn't the city pick up the trash more often?" Here is a compelling solution as part of the business plan competition at BU. One point though--it may cost $212 to build today (something tells me they're using motes more expensive than our very own Tmote Sky), but should reduce to much less than $100 in volume. Check out the article here: http://www.boston.com/business/personaltech/articles/2006/06/05/motes_make_trash_cans_smarter/
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.
Boomerang, Moteiv's distribution of TinyOS, is a combination of TinyOS 1 and TinyOS 2, enbling backwards compatibility for old TinyOS 1 applications while leveraging the robustness and new abstractions from TinyOS 2 where possible. http://www.sensorsmag.com/sensors/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=324975 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.
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. 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.
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. http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/msp430fg4618.html
Two articles:  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 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. 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.
The ShotSpotter system is nothing new. Vanderbilt University has shown a very accurate sniper location system that they had tested for urban warfare use. As part of the same DARPA project that originally funded the Moteiv founders when we were at Berkeley, the Shooter Localization project at Vanderbilt achieved accuracy of less than 1 meter in 3-dimensions, compared with 10 meter accuracy in the ShotSpotter system.
Bandwave has deployed a number of successful systems with Moteiv products, including an outdoor microclimate monitoring application accessible via the web. The deployment is described in detail at Bandwave's site and live readings can be accessed anywhere in the world.
An obvious major concern is how to deal with a huge amount of data from each sensor and camera, more data than all the eyeballs in the world could process. The solution proposed: use wireless sensors to trigger cameras and other devices when an event of interest occurs. A major challenge will be the development and deployment of such a large scale system with potentially hundreds of thousands of wireless nodes in harsh environmental conditions. While the article focuses on video surveillance, the real win is the acknowledgement that a tiered network utilizing miniature wireless sensors will be required for any system to be feasible. Washington Technology published a feature article today about the project with a follow up letter from the editor.
The Retail Industry Leaders Association (a lobbying group of which WalMart is one of the largest members) opposes smart containers, which have wireless sensors to monitor for signs of tampering, and electronic seals because the association claims that the technologies are not completely reliable. According to the article, the association fights a slew of other techniques, including adding additional inspections, to increase port security too. The trade association cautioned Congress against requiring use of "smart containers" and electronic seals for cargo entering U.S. ports, fought efforts to require outside inspections of its members' supply-chain security claims and opposed container-handling fees to fund better port security, the report said. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walport6apr06,1,7249250.story?coll=la-headlines-business
From the OGC Website:
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This week's 
Following on Texas Instrument's announcement of free IEEE 802.15.4 and Zigbee stacks, 
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.
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 
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:
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 
Moteiv has launched our new website this week, with new logo, content, and cleaner look. All of the existing content, including the community pages, are still here in the same place they were before.
CNN has picked up the FIRE project, joint work between the University of California, Berkeley and Moteiv Corporation, for a segment that will air this weekend on CNN and CNN Headline News. The segment on FIRE will air between the following times:
The joint work between the University of California, Berkeley, Moteiv, and Chicago on the innovative Fire, Safety, and Rescue Equipment (FIRE) project profiled in our 
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.
A brief blurb at Tmote Invent is in the June 2006 print issue of Physics Today. There are a number of very interesting sensors also in the article, such as a digital pyrometer and MEMS microphone. Check it out at the link below.
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 (
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. 
Muneeb Ali orchestrated a great paper with some of the top minds that have studied and published work on the issue of media access control in wireless sensor networks. The editorial appeared in this month's ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review. Although I am listed as an author on the paper, the credit belongs to Muneeb who effectively put together the thoughts of many different researchers located continents away from each other.
Raytheon tested a system architecture for border control over a 200-mile span of border. The test uses ground-air surveillance and communicates through a "secure wireless network". The system focuses on coordinating resources effectively from a central location. Border control agents can be dispatched and cameras control from remote locations over the secure wireless network. Their architecture includes the need for remote wireless sensors, which will hopefully play a bigger role in future tests of the system.
ShotSpotter has recently announced its ~$9m of funding and system for locating the origin of a gunshot. An 
Four vendors remain in the running to win the contract from the Department of Homeland Security to secure America's borders. Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon have submitted proposals that are under review. The project is one part of a $10billion integrated wireless network from DHS and the Treasury and Justice departments.
A recent article in the LA Times talks about how WalMart may be lobbying for reduced port security in order to keep profits up. The union blames WalMart for the lack of increased port security.
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.
The