WPAN as innovation?

Werner Almesberger werner at almesberger.net
Thu Apr 14 12:30:17 EDT 2011


jon at rejon.org wrote:
> What would be the dream that can sell someone who is not a freedom advocate
> and is just interested in having connectivity? Is it simply so one can gain
> network connectivity to a hub, aka, get internet?

That's the #1 use I have in mind. People who are building devices
that need low-power and short-range communication may also find this
technology interesting and may find a role for ATBEN/ATUSB.

Likewise, those who already have IEEE 802.15.4 devices may find a
role for ATBEN/ATUSB.

I don't know enough about the industrial/sensor sector to venture a
guess on whether ATBEN/ATUSB could be popular there. There is a fair
amount of activity in this area also in the Free Software community,
e.g., with the Contiki OS [1]. They also have a list of hardware
they support or are at least aware of [2].

[1] http://www.sics.se/contiki/
[2] http://www.sics.se/contiki/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Specific_Guides

> What range can we expect

With my ATBEN/ATUSB prototypes, I've obtained good to acceptable BER
for a distance between stations of 4-7 m indoors in a residential
area with relatively few interferences.

WPAN is designed for a radius of about 10 m. Some manufacturers of
similar chips boast outdoors distances of > 100 m, but I'm not sure
how reproducible such experiments are.

> and how many nanonotes could talk to each other at
> the same time?

This would mainly depend on the duty cycle of their application. If
all they do is send a few bytes of sensor data every few hours,
there could be tens of thousands nodes in a PAN. (PAN = Personal
Area Network, the equivalent to a single LAN in WiFi terminology.)

- Werner




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