By Harry Forbes
A Leader Takes a New Technology Direction
Dust Networks has emerged as the leading supplier of wireless sensor networking (WSN) technology for industrial applications. In April 2010, Dust announced a new product direction. The company will add an ARM Cortex-M3 processor to its future products, and will support several major sensor network standards: IEC 62591 (WirelessHART), 6LowPAN (IPV6), and ZigBee. To understand why the company would make such a shift, it’s helpful to look at Dust’s background and the reasons for its success in industrial markets.
The Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP), developed by Dust for self-organizing networks of low-power wireless sensors, has become the norm in industrial applications. TSMP has been adopted in IEC 62591 (WirelessHART) and a near duplicate of TSMP underlies the ISA 100 sensor standard. TSMP has been successful for two main reasons: low power consumption and reliable message delivery.
Low power consumption is an absolute necessity in most industrial applications. Industrial sensors must operate for years at a time unattended. Users simply will not purchase devices with insufficient battery life. In fact, despite major improvements, battery life remains a barrier to wireless acceptance for some industrial sensing applications. TSMP optimizes battery life by synchronizing a sensor network and thus reducing the major cause of energy waste – idle listening.
Industrial applications also demand reliable delivery. TSMP achieves this through an architecture in which each sensor node also serves as a router. This full mesh architecture vastly expands the possible routes a message can take to reach its destination, making delivery highly reliable despite changing sources of interference. Adding the ”burden” of routing to each node requires network management to optimize the routing duty while conserving battery power. Although invisible to the end user, Dust developed and embedded this feature into its products.
Until now Dust has shied away from giving its customers access to on-board processing. Instead, it provided a SOA-based API at the network gateway, simplifying integration and isolating the low-power sensor network operation from application demands.
Now Dust Networks has changed technology direction. Why the shift? In many ways, the “established” technologies are moving in Dust’s direction. The upcoming IEEE 802.15.4e standard will enable wireless sensors to channel-hop in a manner very similar to TSMP. Many future sensor networking applications envision using the Internet Protocol suite, which has been adapted to IEEE 802.15.4 and that Dust supports.
By adopting multiple sensor network protocols plus on-board computing, Dust’s new products can address virtually the entire WSN market – industrial, commercial, and consumer. Embedding an ARM processor enables Dust to maintain the granular control of on-chip energy use, so the company can continue to drive down energy consumption and extend battery life.
What hasn’t changed is that Dust Networks’ product strategy continues to display a near-religious devotion to low energy consumption and long battery life. While its new products will serve a much broader range of applications, Dust Networks understands that IEEE 802.15.4 technology is inherently a winning fit for applications requiring low power consumption. Maintaining leadership in this category can continue to differentiate Dust Networks as the WSN market expands and commoditization pressures loom.
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