The Internet Engineering Task Force has kicked off a standards effort to provide one of the missing puzzle pieces for wireless sensor networks. Aiming to define a spec for Internet Protocol as early as next summer, the IETF’s Routing over Low-power and Lossy Networks (Roll) group is pursuing a standard way for control and sensor nodes on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 802.15.4 nets to link to the broader Internet.

Today’s sensor networks employ multiple technologies serving a variety of industries, some of which are battling to define the next phase of embedded Internet.

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The Duke Award goes to Sentilla! The prize has been given by James Gosling, the father of Java, and is the biggest award that a company can receive. The Duke Award is the only award given out at JavaOne, a conference with hundreds of exhibitors and over 15,000 attendees.

Congrats to Sentilla and the Sentilla team. They have achieved something that no other company has done–putting a full Java system on 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. They have opened this world up to Java programmers, a huge accomplishment. They have put Java on the world’s smallest computers. Java runs with no compromises — they have not pared anything back. If your application runs on any other certified Java ME system, it will work with Sentilla.

More info here

ns, the free open-source network simulator, is the de-facto standard for research over a wide variety of networking areas. ns version 2 is widely used across both academia and industry as a way of designing, testing and evaluating new and existing protocols and architectures, and has also proven a very useful tool for teaching purposes. ns version 3 is under active development.

The Workshop on ns-2 (WNS2) is a two-day event held in conjunction with VALUETOOLS 2008, the Third International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, during the week of 20-24 October 2008 in Athens, Greece. WNS2 2008 follows the success of the first WNS2 workshop in 2006. A tutorial day on Thursday 23 October is followed by presentation of reviewed papers on Friday 24 October 2008.
The main goals of this second WNS2 workshop are to bring together networking researchers from both academia and industry, to discuss recent advances, to identify future directions in network simulation, and to foster interdisciplinary collaborative research in this area. The workshop aims to emphasise the future evolution of ns-2, now that ns-3 is under active development, and its extension in novel research areas and networking technologies and scenarios.
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Measure, measure, measure: It’s one of the pieces of advice repeatedly doled out to companies looking to make their datacenters more energy-efficient. Without question, it’s a sound suggestion; if you don’t know where you’re starting from, how do you know where you should go or whether you’ve made any progress ?

The real difficulty, however, lies in the measuring process. It can be time consuming. And once you’ve thoroughly measured the temperature, humidity, airflow, and energy consumption throughout your facility, you have a valuable snapshot — but just for a while. As time passes and changes occur within your datacenter — new equipment is added, a tile plate comes loose, a CRAC unit goes down — you might not realize you have a hot spot until the next time you take a measurement (or a system overheats).

More info here.

From Crossbow’s blog:
Motes have been launched into a new dimension. Researchers at NASA Ames Research Center have taken the capabilities of the MICAz Mote platform and sent them to a new level…literally. Wireless sensor networks and Motes are used to monitor environments or objects to detect changes and provide information or alerts about the current configuration in real-time. This time Crossbow’s MICAz Mote platform was used in a rocket engine monitoring system.

Unlike most mechanical systems, rocket engines rarely fail gradually. It’s not like having your brakes wear out in your car where you can feel the brake pads getting warped. In a rocket engine, if something fails, it happens quickly making it difficult to determine the root cause or to do anything to avoid the failure. When a rocket engine does malfunction, sensor data provides important clues about the cause. The vehicle health monitoring system relays pressure, temperature, voltage, strain and acceleration data back to the Mission/Launch Control Center. Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring (IVHM) goes a step further by providing onboard processing capability often detecting engine anomalies earlier and responding faster than a ground-linked system.

More info here.

Advances in wireless networking, micro-fabrication and integration (for example, sensors and actuators manufactured using micro-electro mechanical system technology, or MEMS), and embedded microprocessors have enabled a new generation of massive-scale sensor networks suitable for a range of commercial and military applications. The technology promises to revolutionize the way we live, work, and interact with the physical environment.

More info can be found here

August 18-22, 2008, Castle Ebernburg, Germany

Description:
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Heterogeneous networks of sensors and unmanned vehicles open avenues for a class of novel applications. Tasks ranging from environmental monitoring to user support within emergency-response scenarios require fundamental, multidisciplinary research, typically spanning Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering topics.

This summer school sets out to survey the state of the art in several highly important subareas of the above research domains. The lectures and tutorials will be held by top speakers from academia and industry.

The summer school will also provide a good opportunity to get to know other academic, industry and government researchers working in this field, to meet distinguished scholars, and to establish contacts that may lead to research collaborations in the future.

This 5-day event will feature a number of different activities like lectures, hands-on tutorials, reading sessions and social events. The summer school is organized by the Research Training Group “Cooperative, Adaptive and Responsive Monitoring in Mixed Mode Environments”, funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG, under grant GRK 1362 and endorsed by the EURON SIG on Cooperative Robotics.

Important Dates:
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Application deadline: June 16, 2008
Notification of admittance: July 1, 2008
Summer school venue: August 18-22, 2008

Application:
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The intended main audience of the summer school are PhD students; participation is open to all qualified applicants, but the number of participants is limited, thus early application is strongly recommended. Participants will be selected based on work area, background and date of registration.

The registration fee (approx. EUR 400) includes accommodation at Castle Ebernburg, all meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee breaks), several social events and all study materials.

For more information, please visit the school’s website.

Sunrise Technologies is teaming with Ember to turn the country’s grid of streetlights into a wide-area communications network for a host of new public utility, security, environmental and other applications.

Sunrise Technologies’ new BrownBetty system creates a mesh network for communications between ground-based sensor and control devices and the Internet, utilizing Ember’s ZigBee wireless network technology. By taking advantage of the existing streetlight infrastructure with its high elevation poles and clean line of sight, BrownBetty dramatically lowers the cost of backhaul communications while enabling applications that were previously not practical or affordable.

More info here.

Wireless sensor communications and low power go hand in hand. In fact, low power is just as important as the reliability of the communications itself. Before the advent of wireless sensor communications, low power was synonymous with low current consumption. The lower the milliamp figure, the better. To further reduce power consumption, the device was turned off when it did not need to communicate, and was awakened when an alarm situation was raised or a periodic status update was called for duty cycling.

Current consumption continues to be very important in wireless sensor networks. So not surprisingly, state-of-the-art wireless sensor communications components score well on power consumption and utilization of wake-up/sleep modes for duty cycling.

However, power consumption is only part of the solution. Several other factors must also be addressed in order to achieve low power in wireless sensor applications.

Read more here.