With the wide acceptance of Internet Protocol (IP), it is becoming easier to process data and make meaningful use of information. Fortune 500 companies provide enterpriselevel database solutions for data storage and software tools to streamline business processes, such as asset tracking, process control systems, and building management systems (see Figure 1). Smart phones and The Internet of Things revolution is upon us, and by the year 2020, there will be over 50 billion connected things in the world. With the world’s population increasing and resources becoming more precious, this interconnection promises to supply real-world data to drive higher efficiencies and to streamline business practices. Tablets provide people with useful and actionable information, such as live parking information or real-time machine health monitoring to inform maintenance schedules. And, while there are wireless sensors in place today, there is a hunger for more sensor data to measure and optimize processes that have not been previously measured.
To further enable wide scale deployment of sensors, IP standards efforts are underway, with the goal of making small wireless sensors as easy to access as web servers. These efforts are the confluence of two driving forces: the proven low power, highly reliable performance of time-synchronized mesh networks, and the ongoing IP standards efforts for seamless integration into the Internet. Together these forces will drive relatively small, low power sensors that communicate reliably and are IP-enabled.
Wireless Sensor Network Challenges
Since wireless is unreliable by nature, it is important to understand the sources of unreliability to be able to account for them in communication systems. In low power wireless networks, the main sources of unreliability are external interference and multipath fading. Interference occurs when an external signal (e.g., Wi-Fi) temporarily prevents two radios from communicating. This requires them to retransmit, hence, to consume more power. Multipath fading happens when a wireless signal bounces off objects in the vicinity of the transmitter, and the various echoes destructively interfere at the receiver’s antenna. This phenomenon is a function of the position of the devices, the frequency used and the surrounding environment. Because the surrounding environment of any wireless system changes over time, any single RF frequency channel will experience problems over the operational life of a wireless system.
Click Here for the full white paper, “Reliable, Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks for the Internet of Things: Making Wireless Sensors as Accessible as Web Servers”, by Ross Yu, Product Marketing Manager
Thomas Watteyne, Senior Networking Design Engineer Dust Networks Product Group
Linear Technology Corp.
