Two things are wrong with what you say:
1) The ZigBee Alliance have published a series of specifications. You could argue the line between specification and standard, but the many and varied industry members of the ZigBee Alliance would probably argue that it IS a standard.
2) The ZigBee Alliance have begun incorporating 6lowpan into their portfolio of "standards". The two understand the pervasiveness of IP networking.
A company in Fremantle (Western Australia) called Nautronix has been doing something like this for at least 4 years now. It's not as basic as simple sonar pulses; they actually modulate digital information onto the sonar signal (hence the likening to GPS). I didn't have time to read the patent application, but it would seem to me that Nautronix have prior art here.
N.B. I'm fairly sure they just (last month) got bought out by a US defence super-company (one that buys up lots of small companies to exploit they're IP), so I'm wondering if this patent application has something to do with that...
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Two things are wrong with what you say:
1) The ZigBee Alliance have published a series of specifications. You could argue the line between specification and standard, but the many and varied industry members of the ZigBee Alliance would probably argue that it IS a standard.
2) The ZigBee Alliance have begun incorporating 6lowpan into their portfolio of "standards". The two understand the pervasiveness of IP networking.
A company in Fremantle (Western Australia) called Nautronix has been doing something like this for at least 4 years now. It's not as basic as simple sonar pulses; they actually modulate digital information onto the sonar signal (hence the likening to GPS). I didn't have time to read the patent application, but it would seem to me that Nautronix have prior art here.
N.B. I'm fairly sure they just (last month) got bought out by a US defence super-company (one that buys up lots of small companies to exploit they're IP), so I'm wondering if this patent application has something to do with that...