TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality

An anonymous reader writes "When Google is clouding the borderline between web and the desktop, a much, much smaller project is blurring the border between the Internet and the physical reality: the newly released Contiki operating system version 2.2.1. Contiki runs on networked wireless sensors that are used for anything from road tunnel monitoring for fire rescue operations to collecting vital statistics from ice hockey players. These sensors typically have as little as a few kilobytes of memory and a few milliwatts of power budget — a thousandth of the resources of a typical PC computer — yet Contiki provides them with full TCP/IP connectivity. Meanwhile, San Francisco is monitoring parking spaces with wireless technology."

Comments

Retarded headline

[QuantumG]

No only did I think the story was about Intellectual Property, it also makes no sense at all. The Internet Protocol has been a "Physical Reality" for decades.

Re:Retarded headline

[DavidD_CA]

Agreed.

At first, I thought this got me hopeful that someone at the US Patent Office found a clue and that perhaps they might have landed back into our physical reality -- instead of the bizzaro universe they currently inhabit.

And then, after reading the first sentence from my RSS feed, I thought the story was about The Matrix being real. Or something like it.

Either way, I'm disappointed. And traffic in San Francisco still sucks.

Re:Retarded headline

[teh moges]

Sounds more like a cleverly disguised advertisement to me.

Re:Retarded headline

[pjt33]

You had me until "cleverly disguised". Since about 90% of stories on /. nowadays are advertising, it's less a question of cleverly disguising it and more a question of hiding a tree in a forest.

Ubiquitous Computing

[The Master Control P]

This is one of three parts that will enable ubiquitous computing - the ubiquitous data gatherers & environmental sensors.

The second is a wireless routing protocol that really supports jumping from one AP to another (This will be worked out, probably as a derivative of cell phone networks, when people start roaming further than a single WiFi AP and demand seamless transitions) without disrupting existing sessions. More than just auto-connecting to a new AP, but having previous datastreams (streaming music, calls, chat) redirected to the new address and handing over authentication tokens as well.

The third is a system capable of generating or pattern-matching meaningful information from new sensors without being explicitly told how (since not even a geek such as I would want to program my implants to recognize every new blobject they encounter). We'll get there eventually.

Re:Ubiquitous Computing

[stevedcc]

You're talking about two different things, really. I work for a company making sensor network software and hardware. You're never going to get it running on the same Access Pointss as consumer internet - the requirements are too different.

For the sensor networks, we're aiming for 10 year battery life, with network bandwidth that makes modems from 10 years ago look fast. No one wants to use that for their AP.

The ONLY part of the sensor network that might use a consumer AP is the link between the sensor net and the outside world - but in practice sticking a SIM card into the link is the easiest thing

Thanks Timothy

[oodaloop]

Another brilliant, clear, and useful article summary about...what exactly? The connecting-things-to-stuff dept doesn't help much either.

I hope they're using IPV6

[darkonc]

all of the units in a single project could easily fit into a single 48-bit user space, but if you start trying to give individual sensors unique IP4 addresses, you're going to chew through the IP address space in short order.

If, on the other hand, you try to use private IP4 address blocks, you're going to risk address collisions when you try to combine networks (and have a harder time resolving such collisions, given the kind of objects you're playing with).

Re:ubiquitous IP

[flonker]

Security cameras transmitting over the air is a bad idea. Jamming radio is old news and quite easy to do.