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.