Hi I'm Rob Conant, the Vice President of Marketing at DustNetwork Center here today to talk to you about wireless mesh networks. Wirelessmesh networks are all about access to information. Now we're all used togetting information from our cell phones, from our web browsers, wirelessly orwired broadband TV, but one area where we have, actually, quite difficult timegetting access to information is information from the physical world.
Let's look at a couple of examples. First, commercialbuilding. In a commercial building there are all sorts of different sensorsthat people use to control that building to provide safety, security, energy,efficiency. So for example maybe you have a temperature sensor, maybe you haveaccess control sensors, maybe you have energy consumption sensors, maybe youhave lighting sensors and these sensors are typically all routed back to acentral location where that information is used to produce energy costs or to increaseoccupant comfort, but the problem is getting access to information out here isactually quite expensive so a simple temperature sensor might cost $20 but itcosts $400 to get that installed and that's all pulling wire, it's dry walling,it's paint. You know, it's 1940's technology applied to 2005 buildings.
Another example, port security is a big problem today. In aport, yeah, maybe you have you know, containers and a ship. I mean around thatport you might have a fence and at best you've got video cameras and a guard,but there's all sorts of information that's out here around that perimeter thatyou really like the port security folks to know. You'd like to have motionssensors, you'd like to have vibration sensors so they can see if someone'sclimbing over the fence, you'd like to have magnetometers so that you can seeif there's a truck driving through and this is true of ports. It's also truearound any critical infrastructure, around pipelines all sorts of places whereyou'd like that information, but today it's very difficult to get thatinformation back to a central location so somebody can make sense out of it.
So what is a wireless mesh network and how does it solvethese two problems? Well wireless mesh network is a system that is connected toany kind of land, this could be over a cellular network or a typical officeLAN, you've got an access point and then you've got your sensors that can bedistributed around in large areas and a port or tens of thousands sensorsthroughout a building and these devices all connect together one to the next tothe next to give you a very reliable wireless network, a network that you candeploy in a building, drive away and never have to send your maintenance guyout to fix the devices. It's reliable because each device in the network hasbuilt-in redundancy and can talk to it's neighbors.
So wireless mesh networks provide a couple of things. Firstis increased information, second decreased cost and these two things togetherwill make it so that people can use more sensors, collect more information,provide better security, better energy efficiency, and really bring or controlthe physical world into the 21st century.
