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A3 Wireless Products: Transforming Building Automation
Low-cost wireless sensor and control systems are poised to transform the building automation market. Not only will they reduce overall installation costs, but also lead to increased use of sensors and control devices necessary to establish and maintain highly energy-efficient building operations and productive and healthy work spaces.
The use of wireless devices will
significantly reduce the installation cost of sensors allowing more
sensors to be deployed, which will enable improved control (for
increased comfort and energy efficiency), monitoring (for continuous
commissioning),
and diagnostics applications (for improved equipment utilization) in commercial buildings.
In order to turn this vision into reality, wireless systems need to
maintain some key properties of the medium they replace - conventional
copper wire. These include reliability and ease of use:
Reliability - Today's 2.4-GHz ISM band is used by a large number of wireless devices (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, wireless USB) and the number one cause of poor reliability in RF sensor data transmission is interference caused by other RF devices.
Ease-of-Use - Spinwave sensors, building automation interface modules and deployment tool provide you with a system that is extremely easy-to-use and maintain yet provides flexibility that is unmatched by wired solutions.
Spinwave has developed its products to
address the unique characteristics of wireless sensor networking. The
end result is a wireless product line that is extremely scalable,
robust, and easy to deploy and maintain in real world environments.
Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks
Spinwave has developed its patent-pending A3
™
technology, incorporating three
techniques that serve to provide ultra-high reliability (by
avoiding RF interference), and minimize power consumption while providing
high data throughput. Spinwave refers to these techniques as temporal,
spatial, and density frequency agility, which collectively perform
dynamic adaptive channel hopping in multiple dimensions.
The agile (self-adapting) network is based on the synchronized network
architecture of IEEE 802.15.4.
With the temporal, spatial and density frequency agility, the wireless
sensor network possesses superior network throughput, reliability,
scalability, and battery life, even in a harsh RF environment. These
innovations allow broad geographical areas, with numerous, varied
sources of RF interference, to be effectively and reliably serviced with
a wireless sensor network.
Temporal (Time-based) Agility
Temporal frequency agility is achieved by performing channel hopping
according to a channel profile. This channel profile is dynamically
maintained based on the assessment of the degree of noise or
interference within an RF channel. According to the channel profile, less interfered channels
are utilized in a majority of the time and severely interfered channels
are avoided. This capability can be viewed as an intelligent adaptive
learning system. With the change in the RF characteristics of the
environment, the system can automatically adjust its behavior to achieve
the highest level of interference avoidance and reliability.
Click here to see how Spinwave's wireless sensor network dynamically selects the four best IEEE 802.15.4 channels in a severely interfered environment, avoiding interference sources as they appear while maintaining optimal throughput.
Spatial (Regional) Agility
Spatial frequency agility is utilized in a network that traverses a geographical area in which there are multiple, region-specific, interference sources. In such a case, separate, region-specific channel hopping patterns (or channel profiles) are used to avoid these varied types of interference. The wireless mesh network is divided into segments according to the differences in the spatial, or region-specific, RF characteristics. These segments are connected and coordinated by dynamically assigned Spinwave “covalent” nodes. A Spinwave covalent node is capable of multiplexing network segments running with different channel hopping profiles. The spatial segmentation can be dynamically adjusted according to the changes in the RF environment to achieve optimal reliability within a given geographical area.
Density Agility
Density frequency agility has been developed to avoid the formation of high density wireless networks which can cause problematic local saturation of the RF band. Better reliability is achieved by separating one highly dense network into multiple, overlapping network segments of lower density. Each of these new network segments run in different RF channels within the same geographic space. Similar to the spatial frequency agility, the network segments are connected and multiplexed by the Spinwave covalent nodes. The density frequency agility dramatically reduces the collisions and traffic congestions commonly seen in a high density wireless sensor network thereby improving reliability.
