Sensor-based wireless mesh networks are taking shape in small corners of the factory floor and out in the field, but a San Francisco-based start-up is looking to make the technology ubiquitous and enterprise-ready.
Founded in mid-2005, Arch Rock will soon launch foundation technologies, consisting of a portable operating system, layered networking protocols, and a service-oriented architecture, that can enable multi-vendor hardware to exchange data across a wireless mesh network. The approach, said Arch Rock officials, is analogous to what TCP/IP is to the Internet today -- the lingua franca of Internet connectivity.
"The beauty of the Internet is that you and I can send e-mail regardless if one of us is using a PDA over a cellular connection and the other is using DSL. Those disparities in the link technology are shielded away from layered networking, like TCP/IP," said Roland Acra, Arch Rock's president and CEO, in an interview. "We would like to bring that paradigm to the sensor network as well."
The company will work with wireless mesh networking chip and device vendors to create a scalable programming model that will move these typically proprietary set-ups into an enterprise framework. "We are taking it to the next step," Acra said. "It's nice to do proof of concept; now we need to remove the obstacles that will stop it from being part of [the] mainstream enterprise."
Many companies to date have been working with Zigbee or using proprietary mesh protocols that can't always feed into the enterprise network, Acra said. Arch Rock will leverage the TinyOS, an open source operating system designed at the Intel Lab at the University of California at Berkeley specifically for wireless sensor networks and developed by Dr. David Culler, a co-founder of Arch Rock. The OS's goal is to ease application development and allow integration with multiple sensor vendors.
While the company has only been testing its technology with a handful of customers, there is a huge untapped market opportunity. According to a report released in July by ON World Inc., a wireless research company in San Diego, over 100 OEMs or service providers are developing wireless sensor network products, and mesh deployments are on the rise -- expected to result in a $5.5 billion market opportunity for industrial applications alone by the year 2010.
In industrial automation the Arch Rock technology can be used for condition-based maintenance for machinery, monitoring massive asset bases in an oil pipeline or refinery, for example, or tuning parameters in the production process, Acra explained.
Acra is confident that Arch Rocks' products will be able to capitalize on the existing installed base opportunity -- and investors seem to agree. In October, Arch Rock secured a $5 million Series A investment from New Enterprise Associates, Shasta Ventures, and Intel Capital. The money will be used to expand the company's team -- currently composed of 10 people -- in the area of sales, marketing, and engineering.
The company name was inspired by the actual Arch Rock location in Northern California which co-founder Culler has described as a bridge between the elements. "He was trying to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical domain," Acra explained.