WSN Update

Millennial Net announced yesterday the availability of their new 5424 family of wireless sensor network products. The new hardware operates at the globally available 2.4GHz frequency and is targeting deployments in challenging environments, such as industrial facilities, factories, and hotels.

While Millennial Net did not provide any reliability figures in their press release (as Dust Networks did in our last post), they do claim enhanced reliability for harsh environments. I will be sure to follow up this post with some details once I try their new product out first hand.

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A recent article by EDN has a nice write up on wireless sensor network hardware by Dust Networks. In the article, Dust claims that their hardware offers the highest system reliability on the market at 99.9%. They acheive this reliability by using frequency hoping instead of a fixed frequency. This technique allows them to overcome much of the interference found in industrial environments.

What I have seen of the Dust hardware certainly is impressive. Their product is easy to use and quick to set up. A simple XML interface is all that is needed to control their hardware from custom applications. These features, along with their reliability, make them a good choice of hardware for any WSN deployment.

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According to a recent report by ON World, Wireless Sensor Networks will be the only feasbile sensing solution for the Oil & Gas Industry, which is projected to spend $200 million on the technology over the next three years. WSN technology is ideal for this industry because of the numerous remote and hazardous locations.

Some specific highlights of ON Worlds report are:

• One quarter of all industrial wireless sensors deployed this year will be for oil and gas applications
• Refineries will be the largest and first segment to take off
• Most research and development is focused on wireless condition based monitoring (CBM) for preventive maintenance
• Oil and gas companies also named geofencing - that prevents unwanted third party contact with pipelines - as an application they would like to adopt

ON World projects that 41 million industrial wireless sensor endpoints will be deployed in 2010, for a market worth $5.3 billion at that time.

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Automation.com carries the news that B&B Electronics has releases the results of an online Wireless Sensor Network Survey of 200 industrial automation end-users and systems integrators. The survery was conducted in cooperation with Sensicast. The full survery results can be downloaded at www.bb-elec.com/wirelesssurvey. Registration is required, so here are some of the main points:

• 73% are researching wireless sensor networking for industrial monitoring applications
  
• 53% are considering deploying a wireless sensor network in 2005
  
• The biggest reason for not deploying a WSN is because of reliability
  
• 2.4GHz is the preferred frequency
  
• Process Monitoring is the most common application of WSN
  
• Most deployments will be in one building of less than 10,000 sq. ft.
  
• Interfacing to existing systems is the most requested functionality (see my previous post on OCTAVEX)
  
• Voltage, pressure, and current are the top requested sensors
  
• Most deployments will have less than 25 sensing locations with 1 to 2 sensors at each location.
  

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