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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | Industry groups including ZigBee, IETF, and ISA are working simultaneously on industrial-grade wireless sensor network standards for both the physical and data link layers as well as the network and transport layers. Meanwhile, all are tasked with helping end users sort through the choices. |
| Keywords: | wireless sensor network, WSN, ZigBee, IETF, IEEE 802.15.4, WPAN, SP100.11a, 6LoWPAN, Arch Rock, Tendril Networks |
Variety is the spice of life, so they say, unless, of course, you are trying to choose an industrial-strength wireless sensor network (WSN) built on technology that leverages any one of a handful of emerging "open" standards. For the past few years, industry groups such as the ZigBee Alliance, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and ISA have been working on building communications protocols that leverage the IEEE 802.15.4 industry standard, a low-rate wireless personal area network (WPAN) that defines the physical and data link layers. Where it gets tricky is at the network and transport layers, where ZigBee, IETF, ISA, and others, including proprietary protocols, duke it out. It's not a war, per se; rather, advocates from each group say, the real battle is in educating the masses. Indeed, there may be room for all three approaches. For example, ZigBee is big in building automation, whereas the ISA SP100.11a working group, which expects to have a standard out next year, would seem to be a natural fit for process-based applications in the plant. Meanwhile, IETF's IPv6-based, low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN), which uses an Internet Protocol (IP), may be more suitable for enterprise environments. In the short term, these vying standards are confusing; in the long term, they could coexist. [Click to continue] |
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