The MISC January newsletter is available for download. In this issue:

- Editorial by Karl Aberer
- Around 20 groups in MICS Centre participate to European projects. This newsletter provides the opportunity to present some of them.
- Mobile payments: where does the Swiss market stand?
- New publications, events to come• Awards to MICS members and SNF
- Wireless sensor and actuator networks are an emerging computer class: welcome to the Sensor Internet!

The IEEE updated its standard on low-rate, wireless personal area networks (WPAN), IEEE 802.15.4(TM), in 2006. This has led it to publish a second edition of the book , “Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks: Enabling Wireless Sensors with IEEE 802.15.4″, which was written to complement the standard and to help those implementing the standard for sensors and actuators.
The new edition, authored by Jose Gutierrez, Edgar Callaway and Raymond Barrett, expands the book to include changes made in the revised standard and the new opportunities it presents. The changes made include two additional physical layers that allow higher data rates at lower frequency bands (at 868 and 915 MHz), an updated security mechanism, and alterations to the MAC sub-layer.

IEEE 802.15.4 addresses applications for sensors and actuators in industrial, agricultural, vehicular, residential, medical and other fields that need relaxed throughput and latency requirements and low-cost, low-power designs. The updated book reviews the standard, the applications that motivate it, and the rationale for design options made in its creation.

The complete story here.

Advanced modulation and RF transmission schemes are quickly moving from lab to field to solve real-world problems, speakers told last week’s IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium.

In discussions ranging from ultrawideband (UWB) personal-area networks to Wi-Fi meshes, academic researchers presented concrete examples of advanced wireless data and sensor networks addressing people’s needs around the globe.

While the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas formed a concurrent backdrop to the Radio and Wireless Symposium in Long Beach, Calif., the researchers had more on their minds than consumer markets.

Take Deborah Estrin, for example, of the University of California, Los Angeles. The principal researcher at the school’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, she demonstrated river and forest monitoring, showing how wireless sensor nets combine with actuators and robotics to form adaptive eyes for such tasks as precision agriculture and tracking species diversity.

The complete story here.