Design engineers assessment of sensor market evolution reveals Wireless Sensor Networks as the hotest sensor technology, with 60 percent of the respondents saying that they see WSN heating up in the next 12-18 months, thanks to greater reliability and easy-to-use, plug-and-play connections. There is also the potential with wireless for significant savings when it comes to installation costs.

The 2010 Trend Watch Sensor Survey results were published by Design News and half of the survey respondents design products for the industrial market. The balance of respondents works in industries as diverse as automotive and aerospace to packaging and healthcare.

When selecting a sensor, respondents said that reliability, accuracy and durability/ruggedness are the top three characteristics, while product support and availability are critical when selecting a particular supplier.

The file with full results is available here [pdf]

Link reliability is an important metric for WSN but the nature of RF propagation and the congestion of ISM bands makes link stability a hard guess. However, the flexibility and economy that low-power wireless networks promise are bringing increasing efforts in the community and the industry to better grasp the effects of path loss and the interference situation in the wireless link.

In challenging environments, the required link budget necessary to maintain a given Packet Error Rate (PER) can be quite significant, which is not compatible with the constrains introduced by inexpensive radio architectures and low-power requirements which define WSNs.

RadiaLE, recently presented at EWSN 2010, is an open benchmarking testbed that allows performance evaluation of Link Quality Estimators (LQEs), it aims for experimentation with existing and future LQE implementations.

More info here

The CONET Master and PhD Thesis Awards were handed over last month during the conference dinner at EWSN 2010, orginized by the University of Coimbra.

Results are as follows:

Academic Master Thesis Award: Matthias Wilhelm for his work: “Implementation and Analysis of a Key Generation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network“.

Industry Master Thesis Award: Carlo Alberto Boano for his Thesis: “Application Support Design for Wireless Sensor Networks“.

Academic PhD Thesis Award: Olga Saukh for his Thesis: “Efficient Algorithms for Structuring Wireless Sensor Networks“.

Industrial PhD Thesis Award: Antidio Viguria for his work: “Market-based distributed task allocation methodologies applied to multi-robot exploration”

Our warm congratulations to all awardees!

More info with photos at the ceremony could be found here.

The Contiki team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4 of the Contiki operating system! Contiki 2.4 brings a number of new improvements over previous versions, several bugfixes, and an overall improved stability of the system. The low-power wireless MAC protocols have gotten an overhaul, improving power-efficiency and improved collision and interference handling. The COOJA/MSPsim simulation environment has received a significant speedup. Two new experimental platforms are included: the Crossbow MicaZ and the Sensinode CC2430/8051 platform. Many improvements and bugfixes has been made to the uIP code as well as the SICSlowpan implementaion of 6lowpan IPv6-over-802.15.4. See the changelog for full details and go to the download section to download the 2.4 release!

For more information click here

Libelium will conduct another Waspmote presentation on February 4th at the the University of Zaragoza (CPS), Spain. Those interested to get a quick intro to the Waspmote platform and couldn’t attend last presentations now have a new opportunity.  Registration available here.

In addition to that, a public Waspmote Training Course it’s also open for registration. It will take place in Zaragoza, February 17th-18th. Previous experience with the Waspmote platform is not necessary for attending the course. Important discounts apply for those who buy a Waspmote Kit in place.

New update of the API functionalities (v0.12) includes localization tools using the mobile phones cells ID’s and their received signal strength (RSSI)

From DASH7 Wireless Sensor Networking Blog

It is a great for the success of wireless sensor networks that people are starting to realize how hopeless the 2.4 GHz band has become, but it is not enough to merely embrace “Sub-1GHz.”  … 433 MHz has greater worldwide appeal, support by the single most import entity for emerging IT standards (the US DoD) and, also importantly, it appeals especially to markets that tend to embrace new technologies a lot faster than does the US private sector.

Technically sound or more like plain marketing?

Full text of the post here

In anticipation to what the Internet will soon develop into, Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP is the first book to take a holistic approach to the revolutionary area of Internet Protocol-based smart objects.

More info here.

From: smartplanet.com

At UC Berkeley, PATH Research Program investigate technologies that would allow cars, buses and trucks to connect with the roadway using sensors placed on vehicles and magnets drilled into the cement. Researcher Wei-Bin Zhang believes the technology could prevent accidents and reduce pollution in the atmosphere with less human interaction in the driving process.

A recent artcle from Zdnet blog presents some facts and progresses regarding Wireless Personal Area Networks.

Most notably, the ratification of the IEEE-802.15.3c-2009, a multi-gigabit/millimeter-wave WPAN standard. A vital signs monitor system, now under clinical trial and progresses with FCC revision of a licensed band for Medical BAN.

Entire article available here

Eventual activity of Mount St. Hellens, the most deadly Volcano in the US, could now be monitored with space age monitoring network developed by the SensorWeb Project, a collaboration from Nasa’s AI Group at JPL and WSU SensorWeb Lab

NASA envisions the future use of this technology to explore other planets:  from dust storms or quakes in Mars to seeking life in potential under-ice ocean in Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon.

Nice video about the Volcano SensorWeb deployment this summer is available here.