WSN Buzz
Fresh updates on wireless networks standards and new technologies
Archive for August, 2009
August 28, 2009 at 1:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that EnerNex Corp., Knoxville, TN, was awarded a contract to help NIST sustain the accelerated development of the hundreds of compatible standards that will be required to build a secure, interoperable smart electric power grid. NIST is obligating a portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds allocated to NIST through the Department of Energy to the contract.
Awarded under an unrestricted, fully open and competitive process, the contract will run for up to two years if all options are exercised with an estimated cost of about $8.5 million.
EnerNex’s first task will be to establish and administer a Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Panel to identify, prioritize and address new and emerging requirements for Smart Grid interoperability and security. This work will further develop the initial NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework (Release 1.0), expected to be released in September for public comment.
Release 1.0 will identify the first set of key standards and provide a roadmap for developing new or revised standards critical to Smart Grid development. It also will describe a reference model to help organize the Smart Grid and identify linkages among many varied Smart Grid components—including household appliances, utilities, windmills and electric vehicles.
The panel will interact with expert working groups, a cyber security coordination task group, and other volunteer technical bodies established by NIST during this first phase of its Smart Grid efforts.
More here.
August 28, 2009 at 12:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Microsoft is testing a white-space system similar in nature to WiFi. The company unveiled its plan recently at a trade conference in Barcelona, Spain, in a white paper entitled, “White Space Networking with WiFi-like Connectivity.” It won the best paper award at the even, SIGCOMM 2009, according to the Harvard Sensor Networks Lab.
The “WhiteFi” concept resembles WiFi, but the application will be far more complicated. Unlike a continuous WiFi network, white spaces are individual bands of spectrum scattered throughout TV channels 21 (512 MHz) to 36, and 38 through 51 (698 MHz). White spaces, also referred to in broadcasting as “taboo channels,” were established in analog broadcasting to prevent adjacent-channel interference.
More here.
August 27, 2009 at 6:52 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Sensorpedia is a program initiated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to utilize Web 2.0 social networking principles to organize and provide access to online sensor network data and related data sets.
Sensorpedia is based on the same underlying social networking and collaboration principles used by popular web sites such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, Google Maps, and Facebook.
Instead of networking users based on mutual personal interests, Sensorpedia networks users based on mutual information interests. It provides near-real-time collaboration among communities with requirements to share sensor information.
An open API and flexible access controls ensure Sensorpedia will work for everyone, regardless of application requirements.
Website here.
August 27, 2009 at 6:18 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Flipping off the lights does save power, particularly if you don’t have to rely on humans.
A study commissioned by the Emerging Technologies Program at Pacific Gas & Electric has found that automated systems for dimming and turning off lights in commercial buildings could cut power consumed by lighting by 50 percent or greater.
Lighting controls from Adura Technologies did the best in the tests, curbing power by 51.4 percent to 72.9 percent. Technology from EnOcean, meanwhile, curbed power consumption by 63.6 percent, but the result varied with the technologies EnOcean was partnered.
The study should be welcome news for the ever-growing number of startups and established companies entering the market for building management tools. Building control, in short, is a mess. Although most large buildings have automated thermostat control, countermanding and overlapping commands often lead to situations where the air conditioner and heater operate at the same time.
More here.
August 26, 2009 at 11:17 am · Filed under Uncategorized
In contrast to the legacy grid, the smart grid will be dominated by an “overlay” of two-way digital networks. Some elements are already in existence, but not on the scale envisioned in the smart grid. These new networks will be constructed using a broad array of technologies including fiber optics, hybrid-fiber coax, twisted pair, broadband over power line (BPL), and wireless technology such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and 3G cellular (see smart grid communication discussion).
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Network topologies will vary from utility to utility. In the design of smart grid networks, tradeoffs must and will be made. Urban implementations dictate different technology choices than rural implementations. The AMI layer requires different choices than the backhaul network. Every network layer and every technology represents a potential avenue for attack.
More here.
August 26, 2009 at 11:14 am · Filed under Uncategorized
You’ve probably heard a little (or maybe more) about the “Smart Grid” — a general term for various methods of making our energy distribution systems more adaptive and flexible, thereby conserving energy through reduced waste and more efficient consumption patterns.
What you might not have heard is the critical role FM radio broadcasting may soon play in this space.
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A number of methods have been proposed for distribution of such control signals from utilities to their customers. Various studies have concluded that distribution via FM-RDS is perhaps most advantageous for this application, given its wide existing deployment, good building penetration, service robustness, low delivery and consumer-equipment cost, and its likelihood of remaining around and unchanged for a considerable period of time.
Another benefit of RDS distribution arises from the fact that FM stations’ coverage in a market typically are well matched to the service area of that market’s electric utilities. This offers a form of coarse addressability inherent to the terrestrial propagation footprint of FM stations (more on addressability below).
Given that the FM-RDS delivery path is already well established, what’s needed to get this concept working are elements on both ends of the path.
More here.
August 22, 2009 at 8:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The term “smart grid” means many things to many people. At the most basic level, the smart grid is defining smarter ways to deliver and use energy — but did you know that the smart grid is also defining new ways to generate and exchange energy information?
Building information technology into the electricity grid will revolutionize the way our homes and businesses use energy. The first step will be to develop open protocols and standards to allow smart grid devices and systems to communicate with one another. That’s why Google and other stakeholders are participating in a working group coordinated by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop interoperability standards for a nationwide smart grid.
More here.
August 21, 2009 at 5:51 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Today IBM is introducing software that extracts actionable business information from the millions of interconnected sensors that link items in the physical world. Using WebSphere Sensor Events software, massive volumes of sensor data can be gathered and analyzed to provide clients with the business visibility needed to quickly respond to changing market conditions. The software is one of many IBM technologies bringing a new level of intelligence to the way in which people, businesses, organizations, governments and systems interact.
Sensors are part of our everyday lives, used in objects such as lights that dim and brighten depending on the level of darkness and in thermometers, which react to changes in temperature. Today, many kinds of sensors are used to monitor and manage water flow rates, highway traffic, seismic activity, air quality, the flow of energy across power grids, and much more. In particular, the use of Radio Frequency Identification sensors is growing for the purpose of item tracking and authentication. By 2010, approximately six billion of these tags will be in circulation.
WebSphere Sensor Events captures data from sensors and automates a reaction by a business system following a set of rules or events. The software is unique in that it spans the entire spectrum of clients’ solution requirements, from capturing information from sensing devices to connecting with systems for analytics, business process management and managing information technology and physical assets.
More here.
August 19, 2009 at 9:37 am · Filed under Uncategorized
ACM BuildSys 2009, “The First ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings”.
We solicit contributions that focus on the design of architectures that are capable of improving the global energy efficiency of buildings leveraging connected sensing systems, networks, and devices. Of particular interest is also the application of sensing and actuation technologies to distributed energy generation systems, i.e., systems to generate energy from federated small energy sources such as microgrids and local green energy sources. Successful papers will demonstrate how much energy is reduced by the authors’ contribution, either through real-world results or credible simulation and analysis. We expect concise papers (max. 6 pages) presenting results from field trials, theoretical and practical issues of improving energy-efficiency in buildings by using embedded sensing systems written from both an academic and an industrial perspective.
Nov. 3, 2009 – Berkeley, CA, US
Workshop page: http://buildsys.ucd.ie/
Call for Papers (pdf version): http://buildsys.ucd.ie/content/call-papers/
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: August 27, 2009, 11:59 pm GMT (EXTENDED)
Paper notification: September 20, 2009, 11:59 pm GMT
Camera ready due: October 1, 2009, 11:59 pm GMT
Workshop date: November 3, 2009
General chair:
Antonio Ruzzelli, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Co-organisers:
Antonio Ruzzelli, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Michele Rossi, Universita’‚ di Padova, Italy.
TPC Chairs:
Adam Dunkels, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden.
Tommaso Melodia, University of Buffalo, US.
TPC Members:
Adam Wolisz (TU Berlin GE)
Alexandru Petrescu (CEA, FR)
Anthony Schoofs (UCD, IE)
Bhaskar Krishnamachari (USC, US)
Branislay Kusy (Stanford, US)
Cormac Sreenan (UCC, IE)
David Culler (UC Berkeley, US)
Francis Rubinstein (LBNL, US)
Gregory O’Hare (UCD, IE)
Jonathan Hui (UC Berkeley, US)
J.P. Vasseur (Cisco, FR)
Kay Römer (ETH Zurich)
Martijn Bennebroek (Philips, NL)
Michele Zorzi (UniPD, IT)
Mischa Dolher (CTTC, ES)
Prabal Dutta (UC Berkeley, US)
Stefan Dulman (TU Delft, NL)
Vartika Bhandari (Illinois, US)
Wedi Heinzelman (Rochester, US)
William W. Braham (UPenn, US)
Zach Shelby (Sensinode, FI)
Workshop Introduction:
Prof. D. Culler (UC Berkeley)
Computer Science Department
Keynote:
Prof. A. Majumdar
Director of the Environmental
Energy Technologies Division at
Lawrence Berkeley
August 18, 2009 at 9:25 am · Filed under Uncategorized
You probably know Wi-Fi well. It connects your laptop to local area networks and from there to the Internet. It probably lives on your smart phone and in your game console if you admit to having one. Wi-Fi supports short-range connections up to a few hundred feet depending on the amount of interference from walls and ceilings. Wi-Fi is based on IEEE 802.11 standards. It offers broadband speeds, from 10 to 100 megabits per second. It is a mature technology that is already embedded in many devices. The Wi-Fi Alliance is the industry association charged with development, certification, and promotion.
Wi-Fi has a lot going for it, but is still searching for a clear role in the smart grid. It is too expensive and power-hungry for many types of meters, sensors, and switches but it lacks the range to serve as a general-purpose backhaul network (with the exception high-density urban areas). Wi-Fi falls short of ZigBee inside the home and it falls short of WiMAX across the neighborhood. Different companies are working on solving both of these problems.
The list and details are available here.
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