Messy Networks for the Internet of Things

blog.beepnetworks.com

36 points·slewis··4 comments

"Daniel is co-founder of Beep Networks, a maker of location-aware sensors and systems for low-power wide-area networks."

The article is not about self-organizing ad-hoc networks. No, all the organization is at Master Control in the "cloud". This seems to assume that all nodes have solid connectivity to the "cloud", and are just leaf connection points for nearby devices.

That's what WiFi does.

Good point. I meant ad hoc tower deployment, not ad hoc mesh networks. Our topology is (mostly) star. Will update to clarify.

Has anyone got any really life practices of LPWA? I'm not convinced there is a need for this kind of thing. Tiny sensors with batteries that last years. Most devices have a power source the sensor can tap into thus what are the applications for LP?

There are lots of things right now which talk over two-way paging networks. This is called "machine to machine communication". Most messages look something like "A/C 3152 fault 00 cp1 ON cp2 OFF inside temp 72 outside temp 81". It's common to send text rather than binary so that both humans and machines can read the messages.

Millions of boring but important devices such as pumps, chillers, and fans are sending boring but useful messages like that. Traffic is low, maybe every hour or even once a day when things are normal. A fault generates an immediate message.

Power isn't a problem. Most of the devices which do this are attached to something that has far more power than a radio needs.

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