Wireless mesh networks

Hi I'm Rob Conant, the Vice President of Marketing at Dust Network Center here today to talk to you about wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks are all about access to information. Now we're all used to getting information from our cell phones, from our web browsers, wirelessly or wired broadband TV, but one area where we have, actually, quite difficult time getting access to information is information from the physical world.

Let's look at a couple of examples. First, commercial building. In a commercial building there are all sorts of different sensors that people use to control that building to provide safety, security, energy, efficiency. So for example maybe you have a temperature sensor, maybe you have access control sensors, maybe you have energy consumption sensors, maybe you have lighting sensors and these sensors are typically all routed back to a central location where that information is used to produce energy costs or to increase occupant comfort, but the problem is getting access to information out here is actually quite expensive so a simple temperature sensor might cost $20 but it costs $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 a port, yeah, maybe you have you know, containers and a ship. I mean around that port 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 that you really like the port security folks to know. You'd like to have motions sensors, you'd like to have vibration sensors so they can see if someone's climbing over the fence, you'd like to have magnetometers so that you can see if there's a truck driving through and this is true of ports. It's also true around any critical infrastructure, around pipelines all sorts of places where you'd like that information, but today it's very difficult to get that information back to a central location so somebody can make sense out of it.

So what is a wireless mesh network and how does it solve these two problems? Well wireless mesh network is a system that is connected to any kind of land, this could be over a cellular network or a typical office LAN, you've got an access point and then you've got your sensors that can be distributed around in large areas and a port or tens of thousands sensors throughout a building and these devices all connect together one to the next to the next to give you a very reliable wireless network, a network that you can deploy in a building, drive away and never have to send your maintenance guy out to fix the devices. It's reliable because each device in the network has built-in redundancy and can talk to it's neighbors.

So wireless mesh networks provide a couple of things. First is increased information, second decreased cost and these two things together will make it so that people can use more sensors, collect more information, provide better security, better energy efficiency, and really bring or control the physical world into the 21st century.