Several major US utilities are now going forward with Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) programs.  Some of these programs will enter the deployment phase in early 2009, where these utilities will each be installing several thousand new smart meters per week.  Since these new AMI deployments cover the entire customer base, it will take several years for a large utility to complete its full deployment.

 

The occasion of new meter installations is an opportunity for these utilities to install a communications infrastructure that reaches into the home and supports future home-based smart grid applications. The new meters must have a 20-year life, yet the networking technology embedded in them is quite new.  Normally, utilities would deploy such new technology very gradually, so that it could be field proven long before it reached most of their customers.  The need to upgrade their entire metering infrastructure precludes using any such relaxed schedule.  To support in-home applications, utilities have chosen ZigBee technology, and in particular the ZigBee Smart Energy profile, which was developed by the ZigBee Alliance in collaboration with US utilities to support home energy applications enabled by AMI.

 

Given the 20-year duration of their technology bet on new meters, utilities are far more comfortable building IP networking into their AMI architectures. Arch Rock announced the Compact Application Protocol, or CAP.  In a nutshell, CAP is an architecture that enables ZigBee applications and profiles to run over IP networks. An important benefit of CAP is the potential to unify diverse types of home networking.  AMI home applications must reach from the electric meter to in-home devices, such as thermostats, water heaters, pool pumps, and (eventually) garaged vehicles.  Choosing a single physical link to reach all these devices is problematic.  Despite boosting their signal power, wireless networks are challenged by some locations of meters and home equipment.  Utilities are more comfortable deploying a combination of wireless and power line carrier networking, but at present ZigBee applications must be wireless only.

 

At an ISA100 meeting in June, ISA100 leaders established a new working group, ISA100.15—Wireless Backhaul Networks Working Group—to develop and maintain a standard to address one or more dedicated or shared wireless backhaul(s) to support technologies running multiple applications. The first of these backbones will be the Fieldbus Foundation’s High Speed Ethernet implementation.

 

To expedite the work, the Fieldbus Foundation and ISA have entered into a cross-licensing agreement allowing the two organizations to collaborate on wireless networks. To enable the ISA100.15 working group to develop the wireless backhaul standard, it will be necessary to use extracts of Fieldbus Foundation specifications, as well as parts of other ISA standards in development.

 

The low cost wireless 802.15.4 links used by Zigbee are ideal for electric meters. However, the radios cannot reach from clusters of meters into residences in many apartment buildings, driving a need for powerline or other options. The startup submitted a detailed technical draft of CAP as a suggested draft standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force in early October. The company is open to any group adopting CAP including the IETF, the Zigbee Alliance or the ad hoc working group of utility companies.

 

CAP marries the application layer profiles and security features of Zigbee on to UDP/IP network and transport layers. The Arch Rock approach embeds Zigbee application protocol information in UDP packets and chooses a UDP port, allowing devices to communicate using an IP address and port instead of a Zigbee network address. The approach leaves intact the clusters, attributes, commands and data types used by the Zigbee profiles, Arch Rock claims.

 

Some of the largest companies in the technology world are putting their names behind a move to build a free wireless network from so-called ‘white spaces.’

 

Microsoft and Google were among the companies praising a recent FCC report which concluded that the establishment of a free wireless network in the empty spaces between broadcast channels would not interfere with any other device, paving the way for the system to move forward.

 

With the advent of radio frequency (RF) entertainment control network technology, infrared (IR) based remote controls will soon become as antiquated as buggy whips in the automotive age. To help accelerate the transition from IR- to RF-based technology in the consumer electronics world, Freescale Semiconductor has announced an initiative to offer its RF entertainment control network technology as an open industry specification to leading consumer electronics manufacturers.

 

Freescale is currently defining the entertainment control network specification, known as Synkro, in collaboration with an elite group of consumer electronic manufacturers. Freescale plans to make the Synkro protocol broadly available to the industry through an open and global standards forum designed to enable wide adoption of the technology. The standards forum and entertainment control network specification are being defined and finalized simultaneously.

 

The foundation of this new project is built on the essential strengths and expertise of each partner. Atmel’s innovative low-power wireless hardware is being utilized, Cisco is contributing its expertise in IP networking, and SICS brings to the table its embedded operating systems design knowledge.

 

GainSpan brings Ultra-low-power Wi-Fi to sensors and embedded applications. The company’s semiconductor solutions break new ground in Wi-Fi applications by enabling years of battery life for Wi-Fi sensors and other devices.

 

In September of 2006, a core team of engineers and thought leaders spun off from Intel Corporation to form GainSpan. The vision was simple… enable and accelerate the adoption of new wireless usage models for sensor network applications using an existing widely deployed standard technology.

 

The solution was innovative… new Wi-Fi semiconductor and software solutions that enable sensors and other devices to run up to 10 years on a single AA battery. This allows users to leverage the global Wi-Fi infrastructure, existing tools and knowledge investments, for new applications such as temperature monitoring for energy management, condition monitoring of industrial equipment in manufacturing plants or streetlights in metro areas.