WSN Update

(managinautomation.com) - Gardner Denver, like so many other manufacturers struggling to differentiate their products, is eyeballing new ways to build customer loyalty while making money. This predictive-maintenance service is a good opportunity to do just that. And it wouldn't be possible without the new sensor-based wireless networking technology that is now emerging. For the last few years, companies like Millennial Net Inc. (Burlington, MA), Ember Corp. (Boston), Dust Networks Inc. (Berkeley, CA) and Chipcon AS (Oslo, Norway) have been rolling out chips and protocol stacks for radio frequency (RF) communication. What they are selling are the guts to what is called a wireless mesh network -- an ad hoc, self-healing network that uses intelligent sensors to gather data from devices and equipment to be transported back to a central server.

The technology idea -- based on lowering infrastructure costs and gaining visibility into out-of-reach devices in the field -- has been percolating for a few years. But some of the key ingredients to really allow this technology to proliferate are just now rolling out. Things like an industrial-strength communication standard, the ability to connect the local mesh network with a wireless wide-area network, having a service-broker to manage the communication calls and designing applications that can operate on the wireless network are in the early introduction phase. Once everything comes together -- in about two-to-five years -- it will change the way manufacturers gather information without adding a lot of overhead.

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