"Software Adds Smarts to Sensor Nets"
EE Times (10/30/06) No. 1447, P. 18; Wirbel, Loring

A University of California at Berkeley team that produced the TinyOS embedded operating system has created a company that will provide software intelligence to wireless sensor networks. The company, known as Arch Rock, will offer the Primer Pack environment that builds on middleware work done by Berkeley on three generations of "motes," which are sensor nodes designed into meshes that employ TinyOS 2 for self-discovery and monitoring. "We have developed TinyOS and TinyDB environments, but we intend to be responsible members of the open source community, which is important as open-source tools move into the industrial and factory automation worlds," says CEO Roland Arca. Companies are taking advantage of the opportunity to use the software for motes without adopting Arch Rock's hardware: "We have been using the Layer 7 features of primer pack first, because we have our own custom motes," says Bikash Sabuta, chief technology officer of Aginova, a system integrator that develops software for wireless sensor nets. Sensor nets often exist in their own realm, so addressability using IP addresses or higher-layer service-oriented architecture tools have not been a goal in the past; but this must change if sensor networks are going to contribute to the IT infrastructure. The system's nodes can be used for sensing environmental characteristics such as temperature, light, and humidity. Simple high-layer commands are capable of rapidly altering conditions, for example, turning on a light as a door opens.

(From EE Times)