Wireless Sensor Networking

After 10 years of research and trials, the drivers that will bring sensor network technologies to an increasing number of applications are growing.  As resources become more scarce and expensive, managing them more accurately become critical and economic.  Take Energy for example.  As you look around your house, how many things are taking energy that you don’t even notice?  How much are they costing you and how do you decide whether you should keep using them, replace them, or just manage them more carefully?  Or take an industrial environment.  How do you balance the frequency with which you send personnel out to maintain hardware with the cost of sending them out.  If the hardware could tell you how it is performing, you cannot optimize the scarce resource of trained personnel.  Without data, no one can manage the resources that we use. 

One impediment to the instrumentation of the world around us is that cost and much of that cost is tied up in the software needed to make these sensors run and communicate with larger systems.  As long as these solutions require specially trained engineers using specialized tools and complex algorithms, the progress will be slow and expensive.

The .NET Micro Framework provides part of a solution that builds a uniform development environment from sensors to servers.  All of the applications in the solution can now use .NET and Visual Studio.  In addition, the applications can use the flexible and high productivity interfaces like Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) that allows devices to startup, find the network, ‘discover’ other service providers or consumers on the network, and negotiate the interaction – all without having to have an expert configure the system or install the device.  It just works and this is what it will take to make the sensor networks extend beyond the university laboratory. 

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