SUPPLEMENT THE INTERNET OF THINGS
ZERO-CONFIGURATION FOR WIRELESS SENSING AND ACTUATION
Nelson Matthys from VersaSense and Jackie Rutter from Linear Technology Corporation, highlight how the integration of sensing and actuation peripherals with Linear Technology’s SmartMesh IP, is providing ultra-low power and reliable wireless mesh networking for commercial IoT scenarios across the globe
academic research and has been awarded in the 2015 international IPSO Challenge, an annual global competition organised by the IPSO alliance. The IPSO alliance actively promotes the use of open protocols and standards (e.g. the Internet Protocol (IP) and associated IETF protocols) for building the next generation of Smart Objects. Today, MicroPnP is being successfully applied in industry scenarios across the world, ranging from data centre monitoring, precision livestock farming and monitoring in the oil and gas industry.
I
ndustrial Internet of Things applications, such as smart factories or cities,
demand large numbers of wireless embedded devices equipped with a variety of sensors and actuators. These devices are often expected to operate over long periods of time in harsh RF environments, while periodically capturing environmental or industrial process data. Unfortunately, the current generation of industrial sensing solutions requires significant efforts in terms of development, installation, integration, and management to enable robust IoT systems at scale. Most users therefore struggle with this
complexity and its associated costs, and consequently fail to maximise the return on their investment. Hence, in order to drastically reduce the total cost of ownership for industrial IoT scenarios, a solution is needed that combines easy integration of third-party sensing peripherals with existing applications, reliable, secure and ultra-low power networking, and online cloud services for collecting and storing sensor data. This article describes the MicroPnP
S8 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017 | ELECTRONICS
platform (Figure 1), the standards- compliant low-power Sensing-as-a- Service solution by VersaSense, which realises true Plug-and-Play integration of sensing and actuation peripherals, scalable 24/7 monitoring and control of devices across different sites, and secure end-to-end communication.
TRUE PLUG-AND-PLAY INTEGRATION Passive electrical components are used as an efficient mechanism to detect and identify newly connected sensing or actuation peripherals. MicroPnP’s software stack, in turn, implements solutions for secure device commissioning, automatic over-the-air firmware updates and APIs for integrating sensed peripheral data with online cloud services. Finally, this platform employs SmartMesh IP from Linear Technology, providing wireless mesh networking technology that achieves over 99.999% network reliability even in harsh RF environments, while offering a decade of battery lifetime. MicroPnP is the result of a decade of
Figure 1: The MicroPnP platform
THE MICROPNP SOLUTION IN A NUTSHELL MicroPnP offers a coherent hardware and software toolkit that combines automated detection and configuration of embedded sensing peripherals into the IoT, with extreme wireless networking reliability and battery lifetime. Key differentiators include: 1) Zero-configuration Plug-and-Play peripheral integration MicroPnP automatically identifies all connected embedded sensing and actuation peripherals and installs their corresponding device driver software. The approach relies on low-power passive electrical components and identifying a peripheral that consumes 1 million times less power than traditional solutions like USB or FireWire. Moreover, the approach is very cheap and flexible, allowing any existing IoT sensor or actuator to be immediately repackaged as a MicroPnP-peripheral.
2) Automatic software installation and maintenance Once a peripheral is plugged into a MicroPnP device, all corresponding device driver software is automatically requested to the network gateway and subsequently installed over-the-air. From this moment on, the peripheral is fully functional and available for remote interaction by end- users. To further accommodate application developers, the network manager exposes RESTful APIs to query all devices and directly push sensor data into the cloud.
/ ELECTRONICS
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