The wheel has already been built, says the new Internet Protocol Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance. No use tinkering with an alternate design.
The wheel, in this case, is the communications standard between smart objects - everything from temperature sensors, to electric meters, to vibration meters - and the networks that host them. The IPSO Alliance, launched in September with 25 member companies ranging from Emerson Electric, to Dust Networks, to SAP, advocates the use of the time-tested Internet Protocol (IP) standard for such devices.
The alliance's formation comes at a time when sensors are growing in sophistication, breadth, and number, as businesses warm to the possibilities of a more communicative world of devices.
The organization is taking aim at the legions of proprietary standards that have been developed by individual technology providers. Under such a fragmented schema, a manufacturer that wants to feed its control system or business software with information from a motor's vibration sensor and a temperature meter on a pipe, for example, must build digital gateways to get that data onto the main IT network, which, noted IPSO Chairman Geoff Mulligan, is almost invariably IP-based. And each protocol generally fits just one transmission type, such as an Ethernet line, while IP works across many types of wireless and hardwire transmission.
"The beauty of using IP over other types of protocols is that if that sensor can reach, it doesn't have to go back and make many hops in order to get to that single gateway that's going to then translate [the data] into IP," Mulligan said.
The use of IP would also save end-user companies money on the IT resources they use to manage their networks.
"Why have to bring in yet another really expensive engineer or train someone for weeks or months trying to manage some new protocol, when I guarantee he's already managing an IP protocol?" Mulligan said.
The IPSO chairman dismissed worries that IP is vulnerable to security threats or that the smart objects the group is targeting are too lightweight to handle the IP protocol. IP was developed by the Department of Defense to run classified networks, he noted. It's not the protocol itself that is vulnerable, but the applications that run on it, he added, and if a company is concerned about data security, it can always run a closed-loop IP network or install rugged firewalls or other security devices.
As for the claim that devices as simple as temperature gauges, for instance, don't have the processing power or battery life to conduct IP-based transmissions, Mulligan said researchers have built an IP stack that runs on sub-$2, 16-bit microcontrollers with limited battery resources.
"Everyone thought you had to have a PC to have enough processing and memory to run IP," he said. "That's just not true."