DASH7 Wireless Sensor Networking Blog

More food for thought for non-Korean companies and government authorities still on the fence about RFID, USN/WSN, and the internet of things.

concrete illustration of memories being  added to “things” via RFID.

One area of focus for us in 2010 is that of security for DASH7.  “Security” means different things to different people, and this is part of the challenge in addressing the subject to the satisfaction of the majority, but encryption is where we’re putting our current focus.  This ultimately will serve to allay many of the privacy fears generated by the passive RFID crowd.

If you’ve been paying attention to the buzz around Google Android recently, you’ve probably noted the tsunami of discussion around augmented reality or “AR”.  You can check out discussions on AR here and here, but in short, the idea is that using the GPS coordinates on your smartphone combined with the onboard compass (so your phone knows roughly which direction you are pointing at) can allow an application to overlay “meta data” atop an image you may be looking at through your phone’s camera lens.  Lots of applications, but the most cliche analog I’ve been hearing lately that unfortunately will probably stick is this:  think of the first Terminator movie when Ahhnuld gets a bunch of data about a guy he’s about to pummel in order to score the jacket he wears in the movie.Putting image recognition aside for a moment, the way we will acquire data about an indoor environments like this in the short term is via active RFID like DASH7.  I see the smartphone being the nexus for all this data acquisition, so the wireless transport we choose is imperative.  NFC – only works within 10 centimeters or less of the thing being tracked/read, not secure.   Passive RFID – kills the battery, won’t support sensors, short range, not secure.  WiFi, Bluetooth — also kill the battery, can’t track things that move, can’t penetrate difficult substances, short range.

DASH7, on the other hand, tracks moving things, uses just a fraction of the power of the next alternative, can talk through concrete walls and water, supports PKI, can co-exist nicely with both NFC and WiFi (other technologies at 2.45GHz will be drowned out by 802.11n — the wireless sensor networking “elephant in the room” that few are brave enough to acknowledge … except the brave souls here at the DASH7 Alliance!), and is very affordable both from a device and a TCO standpoint.

If you are contemplating smartphone-based AR investments, you’ll want to consider both indoor environments as well as moving objects and moving smartphones.  We think that DASH7 has a central role to play here … I’ll blog with some more app opportunities shortly.

BTW – James Cameron did Terminator about 20 years ago and I guess we are just about there with at least some of the innovations he and the creators of that incredible flick envisioned.  I saw “Avatar” and thought there was a bunch of tech that was cool but which was already being deployed in the military or that was not far off … perhaps Cameron has an eye for deploying tech in his movies which is not sheer fantasy … though the cloning/consciousness transplantation concept in Avatar is beyond 20 years either Scalzi fans or Ray Kurzweil devotees may disagree … discuss …

DASH7 on your iPhone: coming soon

The rumor mill is in full swing regarding potential plans by Apple to bake RFID into the iPhone.  This is an important topic on many levels, but the first point I’ll make is around the importance of smartphones in the way we think about RFID infrastructure.

Individuals or companies that have worked with Wal-Mart or the U.S. Department of Defense to deploy RFID infrastructure know how costly it can be to deploy and maintain fixed RFID reader infrastructure.  With the intersection of RFID and smartphones, the need for massive deployments of fixed infrastructure will gradually be replaced by the sheer ubiquity of RFID-enabled smartphones that are situated in almost all places, almost all the time. This is a fundamental paradigm shift for the RFID community and smartphones will play a leading role in enabling it.  We call it “Just in Time Networking” since you have RFID network “coverage” anytime there is a smartphone in the vicinity with RFID read capability.

Here’s an example.  Today, deploying RFID to monitor the goings-on in a warehouse (where’s my arc welder?  where’s that order?  where’s that cylinder of plutonium?  it was just here a minute ago … )  typically requires the installation, operation and maintenance of one or more “fixed” RFID nodes, commonly referred to as readers.  The reader usually has an ethernet connection as well as a connection to an AC power source.  Without going into excruciating detail here, take my word for it that putting these fixed readers in place is today not exactly “plug and play” for many customers.  (This does not mean there is not a good ROI when using fixed infrastructure – au contraire – it’s just that the ROI is even greater using JIT Networking.)

Instead, businesses will soon opt to integrate RFID readers on smartphones (via SIM, SD Card, or directly into the phone) and, given the assumption that there are usually one or more employees carrying cellphones in any single physical location of a business, the smartphones themselves will become substitutes for the fixed reader infrastructure of the past.  Sure it’s possible you won’t get 100% “coverage” in that warehouse when every employee with an RFID-enabled smartphone goes home at night for dinner, but many businesses will simply “make do” with having no coverage during off hours and when the employee(s) return in the morning to open up the warehouse, their phones will immediately “illuminate” the warehouse with RFID coverage and voila, RFID visibility into the warehouse is re-established.  Now if your business includes keeping tabs on cylinders of plutonium, this probably won’t fly.  But for many businesses out there, this type of solution is “good enough” even if it is not “perfect”.  As with many wireless technologies, good enough is, well, good enough.

2009 was an important year in the history of wireless sensor networks, but not for all the “usual” reasons.  2009 was less about flamboyant breakthroughs than about quiet but hyper-important infrastructure and investment decisions whose effects that will be felt for many years to come.   Here are my top ten events of 2009 that will most impact the adoption of wireless sensor networking in the months and years ahead as well as my (related) predictions for 2010.  Enjoy and feel free to comment!

1.      DoD RFID III DASH7 Award

In January 2009 DoD awarded a contract for $429 million in DASH7 infrastructure.  Significant because the US Dept of Defense operates the largest and most complex supply chain in the world and both allied defense forces as well as suppliers of many types, including CPG companies, will eventually be required to deploy DASH7 infrastructure.  Given the global footprint of DoD’s supplier network, this is the most profound development of year in terms of global adoption of a wireless sensor networking (WSN) technology based on a single global standard.  That DoD is standardizing internally and externally with  DASH7 is a major event that most outside the supply chain sector missed but will have ramifications for years to come in both defense and commercial sectors similar to DoD’s pivotal impact on barcode and fax adoption.

2010 prediction:  accelerated adoption of DASH7 by defense forces  in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and India.

2.    DoE SmartGrid Stimulus Awards

Federal funding for new investments in measurement and control infrastructure for the nation’s electricity grid will have downstream ramifications for hundreds of applications which may not even be energy related. While this year’s stimulus spending mostly subsidizes  large utilities who are using the technology for demand planning purposes, psychologically the “battle” for control of home automation networks began in earnest in 2009.  Large amounts of government money are enabling a wide array of companies, most of whom are unconnected to utilities, dip their toe into this space and offer a variety of solutions for home healthcare, home multimedia, environmental command and control, and much more.  Many wireless sensor networking protocols — DASH7, WiFi, Bluetooth, ZWave, Zigbee, and others — are taking unique approaches to this market and the smartest companies are digging in for a long ramp up as despite the sugar high of stimulus money, few see utility companies as the innovators that will ultimately drive this market.  2009 was the year of  important investments by component suppliers, device integrators, software vendors, systems integrators, utilities, telco’s, and many that will prove pivotal in raising awareness around opportunities in home/building automation.

2010 prediction:  focus on mobile handsets as the command and control center for home automation displaces set top box/desktop-centric visions.

3.    Formation of the DASH7 Alliance

A small event to some, but evolving the ISO 18000-7 standard from a defense-centric technology to one that is global and interoperable across geographies, industries and applications, will eventually mean access to a single global, interoperable standard for extremely low power wireless sensor data acquisition that is simply not attainable with competing technologies. With the catalyst of the defense sector driving initial adoption (see #1 above), 2009 was the year DASH7 entered the arena as a serious wireless sensor networking alternative and in the eyes of many, the technology that is hands-down superior to the next best alternative.  If WSN is important to your business, put the DASH7 Alliance on your to-do list for 2010.

2010 prediction:  DASH7 Alliance aligns more closely with complementary technologies like cellular, passive RFID, WiFi, and 2D barcodes.

4.    Chinese Political Leadership Embraces Wireless Sensor Networking

When Chinese premier Wen Jiabao pronounced the internet of things as a national imperative for China, it got surprisingly little play in North America, but in Asia it was widely advertised and for those who study China and its increasing sway over technology adoption, this was an important moment as it signaled that not only do government leaders there realize that WSN is critical to China’s future as a manufacturing power, but the internet of things will permeate many other industries where China is or hopes to be a global leader.  As the hub of the world’s supply chain, China’s acknowledgement of the importance of the IOT should strike everyone as pivotal.

2010 prediction:  New announcements from top three Chinese mobile carriers around environmental sensing businesses/pilots.

5.     Twitter:  Human sensor network.

The explosion of Twitter, a service that only a couple of years ago people openly ridiculed, demonstrates the power of a “human sensor network”.  The ability to add non-human sensors to Twitter and other social networking applications is a natural evolution of the current application that will present great opportunities and challenges, but would have been delayed were it not for the “teachable moment” that Twitter provided the wireless sensor networking community this year.

2010 prediction:  presentation of sensor data in 2D environments like Twitter continues to prove disappointing and sensor data over Twitter remains a novelty until 2011/2012.

6.    NTT DoCoMo environmental sensing announcement.

DoCoMo’s announcement of a pilot in Tokyo whereby environmental sensor data would be acquired by mobile phones was a watershed announcement in that it signals how wireless carriers will play a pivotal role in providing a data acquisition interface for unstructured environments like a city.  As the role of sensors and location markers becomes clearer through the growth of augmented reality applications, carriers will see the opportunity to drive new commerce
and advertising revenues as well as leverage GPRS/CDMA backhaul for transporting sensor data as well as for executing transactions resulting from access to sensor data.

2010 prediction:  Regulators in Japan increasingly recommend 433 MHz as the frequency in Japan for a range of logistics and sensor networking applications, to the exclusion of technologies operating at 2.45GHz, which present a range of interference and performance problems there and elsewhere.

7.    The Wikitude Browser and Augmented Reality

The Wikitude browser demonstrated on a basic level how we will integrate masses of sensor, location, and metadata from the physical world around us.  Demonstrated on the Apple iPhone, it relies on GPS (primarily) for deriving location, which limits the application to outdoor environments.  But future implementations will augment GPS data with location and sensor data from DASH7-enabled tags that can be updated by merchants or municipalities simply and cheaply, with minimal maintenance of the tag.

2010 prediction:  Several major CPG companies launch pilots using augmented reality with DASH7.  Augmented reality will become a huge theme in 2010.

8.    IBM’s SmarterPlanet advertising campaign

Regardless of your opinion of IBM, their Smarter Planet campaign this year was terrific.  Suuure it’s nice to have big marketing budgets, a cynic would say, but this campaign articulated opportunities in WSN that raised end user awareness and that will provide benefits to the entire industry.  Sam Palmisano has done a terrific job of aligning what seems like the entire company around this theme and many of us noticed.

2010 prediction:  IBM’s focus on Smart Water is particularly prescient … expect lots of announcements around a “Smart Water Grid” that augments the electrical one that made headlines in 2009.

9.    Wi-Fi Alliance ad-hoc networking announcement

This announcement signalled WiFi’s intent to capture more of the home automation market that is coveted by the Bluetooth/Zigbee/ZWave crowd.  Home automation is already shaping up to be a very heterogeneous landscape with many options, but this ultimately serves to create still further fragmentation, at least for the near future.  I don’t see the same downside for bluetooth that some see with this – I like my bluetooth headset and wireless keyboards – but clearly the WiFi folks fired a warning shot to the rest of the home automation crowd.

2010 prediction:  integration of high-bandwidth/high power WiFi connectivity @ 2.4GHz with low bandwidth/low power connectivity @ 433 MHz (DASH7).

10.      H1N1 “Swine Flu” Virus.

What does swine flu have to do with WSN, you say?  This virus scare/pandemic has illustrated for many just how interdependent we’ve all become and how our massively complex and high-volume commercial relationships with people from across the globe can not only benefit us economically, but also threaten us physically (and economically, if enough are stricken).  The need for better pandemic preparedness and cold chain management will be solved in part by the availability of a wireless sensor networking standard that can allow anyone to operate or interoperate with another network similarly to the way we roam from wifi hotspot to wifi hot spot.  Use of a low cost, reliable WSN technology that we can either re-use or dispose of at the end of the journey is a major advancement that will not only help us mitigate the imapct of pandemics like H1N1, but also — don’t laugh — make us more competitive.  Counter-intuitive, I know, but the smarter we make our supply chains, the more competitive we become.

2010 prediction:  major regulatory breakthrough in the way RF devices are allowed/disallowed on aircraft for purposes of cold chain/perishables management.

What do you think?  Comments are enabled below … have a great 2010 everyone!