Arch Rock Corporation, the first company to offer IEEE 802.15.4 low- power wireless sensor network (WSN) systems incorporating IPv6—the latest and most scalable version of the ubiquitous Internet Protocol—has joined the IPv6 Forum. The IPv6 Forum was formed in 1999 to help create a high- quality and secure next-generation Internet with equitable worldwide access.

Arch Rock uses IPv6 in its Primer Pack/IP, a WSN solution introduced in March 2007. Primer Pack/IP was the first commercial implementation of the IETF 6LoWPAN standard, created to enable wireless IPv6 communication over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radio for sensor nodes and other devices with limited power, memory and bandwidth. By running native IPv6 beyond the WSN gateway to the sensor nodes themselves, Primer Pack/IP enables the sensor nodes to communicate directly with other IP devices across the network and permits direct node access and management. Arch Rock contributed to the 6LoWPAN standard by helping to devise a means of compressing IPv6’s powerful addressing and header information to fit into small packets whose transmission consumes minimum energy.

More info here.

The program of the Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS 2007) conference, to be held in Pisa, Italy, from the 8 to the 11 October 2007 is now online. There will be 18 Technical Sessions, 3 Keynote Speeches, 1 Panel, 1 Demo and Poster Session and 9 Workshops.

The program is available here.

Nordic Semiconductor ASA and ANT have launched the ANTDKT3 wireless sensor network Development Kit.

The ANTDT3 allows the user to:
- Evaluate ANT as the practical solution for wireless sensor networks;
- Design wireless network control and sensor nodes based on ANT chips, chip sets and modules;
- Develop PC applications connecting to ANT products.

Key to the Development Kit’s ease-of-use is the inclusion of a number of modules, interface boards and software applications that are optimized for wireless sensor networking. Modules include RF drop-in modules based on Nordic nRF24AP1, ANT’s AT3 RF drop-in sensor development modules based on Nordic’s nRF24L01 and ANT SensRcore, plus various interface boards allowing ANT to be evaluated in embedded and PC environments. Also included is an ANT monitoring and control PC application (ANTware) and SensRcore configuration PC application (SensRware). In conjunction with the ANTDKT3, these software applications considerably ease wireless sensor node and network set-up and configuration by using a PC based GUI that requires no specialist programming knowledge.

More info here.

Employees’ body language, voice variation, and hallway movements are being mapped by new kinds of wearable tracking devices, reports science writer Mark Buchanan in the autumn 2007 issue of strategy+business magazine (www.strategy-business.com). MIT’s Media Lab, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and Intel Research have developed “subtle sensors” that are enriching our understanding of teams and organizations and that are helping call centers improve telephone sales pitches by 20 percent or more.

However, Buchanan warns that “the ethical challenges the use of sensors raises must be taken seriously if the technology is really to be beneficial.”

More info here.

The second version of XubunTOS, a Linux Live CD with TinyOS installed, has been released. XubunTOS 2.0 builds on Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) and contains TinyOS 2.0.2, TinyOS 1.x from CVS, and custom files for syntax highlighting, shell environment variables, and convenient aliases. You can download XubunTOS 2.0 from the Toilers XubunTOS page.

With the second version, a new feature has been added: an easy way to modify and rebuild XubunTOS. Even though the authors tried to make XubunTOS 1.0 as generally useful as possible, there are always other software packages to install or tweaks to make it that much better. Because it was distributed only an ISO for XubunTOS 1.0, none of those community enhancements were possible, or at least not easy. With XubunTOS 2.0, you can easily modify the Live CD and create your own custom image.

XubunTOS can also be installed inside a VMware virtual machine. Instructions are provided for both Debian-based Linux as well as Windows users here.

The 4th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems- DCOSS 2008 – will be held June 11-14, 2008, on Santorini Island, Greece.
DCOSS ‘08 will co-locate with several related workshops on special topics, including the Workshop on Localized Algorithms and Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (LOCALGOS), the Workshop on Information Theory for Sensor Networks (WITS), the Workshop on Sensor Network Engineering (IWSNE), the Workshop on Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WEWSN), the Workshop on Wireless Sensor Network Deployments (WiDeploy).
Paper submissions are due January 28, 2008. Best paper awards will be given in each of the three conference technical tracks: algorithms, applications, and systems. DCOSS ‘08 Proceedings will appear through the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series of Springer Verlag.

The Call for Papers is available here.

A position for a post-doctoral researcher is now available in the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland. The studentships are part of a project to research and develop a novel network level power management system for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs).
WSNs combine processing, sensing and communications into tiny battery powered devices or motes. It is expect that networks containing thousands of low-cost motes will be deployed over wide-areas to provide long-term monitoring of conditions and/or activity. Potential applications include traffic monitoring, precision agriculture, habitat monitoring, building security, waste control and seismic sensing. One of the key limitations of current WSNs is battery lifetime. The project will seek to reduce power consumption at the network-level.

More info here.

The SenSys’07 preliminary program was announced recently. You can view the program here.

The MISC September newsletter is available for download.
In this issue:
- The MICS Workshop took place in Neuchâtel in July. One of its goals: to discover common research interests and possible collaborations.
- PermaSense illustrates how wireless sensor networks could be turned into a science grade instrument.
- Catherine Dehollain joined the MICS family to work on a «very low radiated power UWB communication» project. Interview with this electrical engineer.
- New publications and agenda.
- What did they become? For the first episode of this series, we traced the Indian Prasenjit Dey who studied at EPFL.

IBM and the Beacon Institute, a nonprofit scientific-research organization in Beacon, NY, have announced a collaboration with several other research institutions to create an environmental-monitoring system for New York’s Hudson River. Their plan is to turn all 315 miles of the river into a distributed network of sensors that will collect biological, physical, and chemical information and transmit it to a central location, where it will be analyzed by IBM’s new data acquisition and analysis system.

The network’s sensors will be deployed in a variety of ways. Some will be mounted on a new robotic underwater vehicle developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, both collaborators on the project; the vehicle will be powered by solar cells and can operate either autonomously or under human remote control. Other sensors will be suspended from buoys or fixed in place along the riverbed.

More info here.