As the Sensors Expo opens today in Chicago, Dust Networks may be pulling ahead in wireless sensor networks by exploiting industrial applications, says EE Times.
Dust will show municipal applications for its Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP), such as a parking sensor system embedded in pavement, developed by Streetline Networks. Streetline will use of Dust for embedded smart-parking-meter technology as part of its City Infrastructure Technologies project.
The adoption of elements of Dust’s protocol helped the company win key contracts from Emerson Controls, GE Sensing and other process control equipment manufacturers, allowing Dust to differentiate itself from competitors such as Crossbow, Ember and Aginova.
All of Dust’s products use unlicensed bands, including a first-generation 900-MHz low-power network, and a 2.4-GHz network that complies with IEEE 802.15.4 stacks. Dust uses 802.15.4 and higher-layer ZigBee protocols, but adds proprietary Time Synchronized Mesh Protocols on top.
These combine elements of time-division multiple access and frequency hopping to create mesh-based routing, which motes can join automatically, and the network self-adapts to changing sizes and configurations. The redundancy inherent in such topologies makes the Dust architecture appropriate for security and public-safety applications, Conant said, though shipping and manufacturing applications currently dominate Dust’s business.
Steve Toteda, who recently joined Dust as vice president of marketing, said that consumer markets such as home automation are no picnics, either, since contractors have not been automatically adopting wireless sensors everywhere. Often, applications funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and developed in academic hotbeds like the University of Southern California are necessary to spur the imaginations of developers in both industrial and consumer markets.
“We need to have those bleeding-edge applications in fields such as security and environmental monitoring to get creative minds to think of new ways to use distributed wireless sensors,” said Conant. “We have a lot of ideas on where the networks can be employed, but the third-party startups like Streetline come up with concepts that would never have occurred to us.”
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