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.

We have been waiting for Sentilla to release their Java platform. Well the wait is over. Sentilla is showcasing the Perk Kit at the JavaOne’08 Conference next week in San Francisco. The Perk Kit contains both hardware and software tools. We can’t wait to play around with this kit and see how Java performs on tiny sensor nodes! More information is available here.

EU FP7 projects SENSEI and PROSENSE invite you to the Third International Summer School on Applications of WSN and Wireless Sensing in the Future Internet, senzations’08. The school will take place at the International Postgraduate School at Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana (Slovenia) from September 1-5, 2008.

Telematics, telemedicine, environmental monitoring, home automation and control, security and surveillance, industrial processes and agriculture are examples of potential applications of wireless sensor networks. Thanks to the broad range of possible applications and potential to change the way we interact with our environment, wireless sensor networks have gained a lot of attention in the research community and are becoming increasingly popular in the industry, too.

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