TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 6, 2008 @05:31PM from the connecting-things-to-stuff dept.

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."

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Ubiquitous Computing by The+Master+Control+P · 2008-09-06 18:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.