Low-Power wireless sensor networks for the Internet of Things

Ross Yu, Product Marketing Manager; Thomas Watteyne, Senior Networking Design Engineer, Dust Networks Product Group, Linear Technology Corp.
EDN (December 22, 2013)

The Internet of Things revolution is upon us, and by the year 2020, there will be over 30 billion connected things in the world. With the world’s population increasing and resources becoming more precious, this interconnection promises to supply real-world data to drive higher efficiencies and to streamline business practices.

With the wide acceptance of Internet Protocol (IP), it is becoming easier to process data and make meaningful use of information. Fortune 500 companies provide enterprise-level database solutions for data storage and software tools to streamline business processes, such as asset tracking, process control systems, and building management systems (see Figure 1). Smart phones and tablets provide people with useful and actionable information, such as live parking information or real-time machine-health monitoring to inform maintenance schedules. And while there are wireless sensors in place today, there is a hunger for more sensor data to measure and optimize processes that have not been previously measured.

To further enable wide scale deployment of sensors, IP standards efforts are underway, with the goal of making small wireless sensors as easy to access as web servers. These efforts are the confluence of two driving forces: the proven low power, highly reliable performance of time-synchronized mesh networks, and the ongoing IP standards efforts for seamless integration into the Internet. Together these forces will drive relatively small, low-power sensors that communicate reliably and are IP-enabled.

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