We had a lot of fun last week at the IPSO Alliance Interop event that I co-chaired.  There were a dozen of us in Santa Clara, and several more in France and Norway.  Altogether we had six hardware platforms running a collection of operating systems and a couple of different PHY/MAC combinations, all talking amongst themselves using IP/UDP packets.  The high point for me was seeing four hardware platforms from three vendors all synchronizing their communications using the soon-to-be-approved 802.15.4e TSCH MAC standard.  15.4e is the same underlying MAC protocol that has enabled Dust motes to route packets reliably for years on battery or scavenger power, and it is now an imminent international standard.  For information about the open source 15.4e software that drove several of the platforms in this demo, see openWSN.berkeley.edu.

It’s very exciting to contemplate the ubiquity of IP-based apps converging with multi-vendor, reliable 802.15.4e based wireless sensor networks (WSN): this means that app developers are now free to treat sensors like nodes on the internet without having to do any customization at all. The breadth of potential apps, and the speed with which they can be developed is a major shift for wireless sensor networking, making ‘things’ in a WSN look more like an iPhone than special purpose HW.

Kris Pister
Dust Networks CTO
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