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For now, says Welsh, his team has no plans to integrate video cameras into the network. However, he believes that the project is a great opportunity to explore the social ramifications of collecting data on an entire city. "CitySense is a good way to come face-to-face with the questions of what it means to outfit a city like this," he says.
In recent years, wireless-sensor networks have gained more prominence as a commercially viable technology thanks to companies such as Dust Networks and Arch Rock, both University of California, Berkeley, research spinoffs. The most common types of sensor networks are often found in industrial settings, where they monitor manufacturing equipment in hard-to-reach places. For the most part, these sensor networks employ tiny, battery-powered sensor "motes" designed to use little power and collect specific types of data.
Building a wireless backbone across an entire city that can accommodate numerous, simultaneous research problems will be tough, says Joshua Bers, a researcher who leads BBN's effort on the CitySense project. One challenge will be to make the network reliable enough by keeping the hardware from failing. "Clearly, if researchers are going to be using it, we don't want this thing to crash and have to have someone go up a light pole 30 feet off the ground to fix it," Bers says. There's one way to safeguard against this, he says: there will be software that will monitor the health of the node, and if something goes wrong, it will automatically reboot.
In addition, CitySense will use "mesh" networking to send data from one point in the network to another point far away. In such a networking scheme, information is transferred to its final destination by hopping from node to node instead of being transmitted directly. BBN has developed a number of mesh-networking protocols that adjust when nodes fail.
Another issue that will need to be addressed, says Welsh, is hardware resource allocations. Since numerous projects and various software applications will be running on the same hardware simultaneously, the researchers will need to find a way to make sure that the processors and memory are divvied up appropriately.
Verizon says its next wireless network technology could link up cars, home appliances, and more.
Mounted on flag polls and used to spot
Smoke and/or flames in a rural forest
setting during Red Flag(no burn) days.
Perhaps a grid-like series of these can be planted along our borders to detect when people are crossing illegally. A sensor system like this can use GPS to pinpoint the crossing location to aid in dispatching border guards and perhaps catalog and count the numbers more accurately too. Power the whole system with protected Solar Panels so it runs 7X24 and we can offset some costs by minimizing headcount for border security.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
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scottminor
1 Comment
Dirt Goes Wireless
CyberUtility, LLC (www.cyberutility.net) has an international patent on a wireless device that will be attached to every property boundary corner on the face of the earth - an ultra dense low power mesh network grid - sensors everywhere - ubiquitous computing, real-time data, personal sensor space, location-aware-search, mobile interactive marketing, mobile augmented reality. Currently, this is the largest proposed international Zigbee mesh network deployment project with 20,000,000 survey pins placed each year in the US alone. Units are the size of a D cell battery with an antenna on top -- but the fully sealed and enclosed device is designed to be buried.
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