Porto, Portugal 2-9 March 2008

The goal of the summer school of KDubiq is to establish a common ground for the integration of the involved fields and to support the formation of a new community. Starting with an introduction into embedded systems, more specialized courses focus on wireless sensor networks and data streams. Based on a course on algorithmic foundations of distributed data mining, privacy issues, Web 2.0 and grid aspects of data mining are being taught. All courses come along with exercises for hands-on experience.

The School’s website is here.

The Nokia Eco Sensor concept device consists of two parts: a wearable mobile phone (duh, it’s Nokia) with giant display and a remote sensing unit which keeps tabs on your health and external environment. Nokia research envisions that the sensor unit would be worn on a wrist or neck strap made of solar cells. It would thereupon communicate back to your phone via near field communications (NFC) or RFID. What you monitor (i.e., the sensors you get) will be customizable based on user preference. You know, like the burn from your jetpack and rate of your daily food replication. Thanks for the look into the future Nokia!

More info here.

Jennic Ltd. has introduced JenNet, a new proprietary wireless networking stack for its powerful range of 32 bit single chip wireless micro-controllers, and new user-friendly programming interfaces, Jenie and AT-Jenie.
More information can be found here.

MSPsim is a Java-based instruction level emulator of the MSP430 series microprocessor and emulation of some sensor networking platforms. Supports loading of IHEX and ELF firmware files, and has some tools for monitoring stack, setting breakpoints, and profiling.

Software development for wireless sensor networks is a challenging and time consuming task. The resource limited hardware with limited I/O and debugging abilities combined with the often cumbersome hardware debugging tools makes low-level debugging on the target hardware difficult. MSPsim, an extensible sensor board platform and MSP430 instruction level simulator that simulates sensor boards with peripherals for the purpose of reducing development and debugging time. The use of a simulator also enables testing without access to the target hardware and makes more advanced debugging and instrumenting possible.

This is an open source project and you could download the source code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mspsim

With a request for Research Proposals, a SunSPOT-based application competition and educational discounts, SUN Microsystems is pushing the adoption of SunSPOT sensor nodes in academia. Research proposal deadline is approaching.

More details can be found here.

Following a reputation for not being as power sensitive as some designers would like, in October 2007, the ZigBee Alliance announced an expanded a set of features for the ZigBee protocol. For networks of more than 50 nodes, ZigBee Pro can provide a faster, more secure and more robust network. Although 2006 ZigBee and ZigBee Pro end devices can understand each other the routers are not compatible.

More details can be found here.

From Embedded.com, another interesting article by Anton Hristozov

The smart sensors used in wireless industrial and building automation applications are often characterized by energy restrictions, small CPUs, and small memory footprints. The limited resources of the hardware make special applications necessary, which in turn create special requirements for the system software.
This three part series outlines the factors a developer needs to consider when choosing system software for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to be used in embedded designs.

While there will be extensive discussion of appropriate RTOSes and features, this series will also evaluate alternative approaches, both commercial and non-commercial, for use in small footprint embedded systems, and will also discuss the usefulness of such approaches in WSNs. Commercial and non-commercial solutions are listed for reference and further exploration of the subject. Some of these approaches might not be familiar to the working embedded developer.

The complete article is available here.

Wireless sensor network vendor Arch Rock Corp. has joined with Hitachi, Ltd., and Renesas Technology Corp. to demonstrate the interoperability of their IETF 6LoWPAN (RFC 4944) implementations at the Seventieth IETF meeting today in Vancouver.

The demo shows Arch Rock’s and Hitachi’s implementations of IETF 6LoWPAN, the recently finalized standard for IPv6 communication over low-power wireless IEEE 802.15.4 personal-area networks. Arch Rock is providing its Primer Pack/IP wireless sensor network, announced in March 2007 as the first commercial product to implement the IETF 6LoWPAN standard; Hitachi’s 6LoWPAN implementation is running over 802.15.4 radio chips from Renesas.

More info here.

The Contiki team has just released version 2.1 of the open source Contiki operating system for low-power, wireless, memory-constrained networked embedded devices that typically have as little as a few kilobytes of RAM. The major highlight of this release is a unique energy profiling mechanism that measures where energy is spent, and how much energy is consumed. This is extremely important when optimizing for low-power operation: to know where to optimize, one must first know where energy is spent. Other additions to the 2.1 release are low-power radio protocols that increase system lifetime from days to years, and improved data collection routing protocols.

The MISC December newsletter is available for download.
In this issue: environmental monitoring with WSN.