A Mote in the Eye of the Wireless Universe?

The market for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) appears to be near the tipping point. Sensicast Inc., one of the leading vendors, believes it has hit on some new applications with broad enough appeal to finally tip it over the edge.

The company expects to announce products this fall that will help corporate data centers maintain compliance with computer vendor warranty conditions—a pressing need, according to Sensicast CEO Gary Ambrosino.

It is also marketing WSNs specifically designed to monitor photovoltaic cells used in solar power generating systems. Given growing concerns about continued use of non-renewable energy sources, this last application will be "wildly interesting" to many companies, Ambrosino says.

WSNs are wireless mesh networks that link "motes," tiny devices that include wireless transceiver, microprocessor, firmware, and at least one sensor for measuring anything from temperature to humidity to motion.

Most wireless sensor networks, including Sensinet—Sensicast's WSN-in-a-box offering—use wireless mesh technology based on IEEE 802.15.4, sometimes referred to as ZigBee. The ZigBee Alliance, a broad-based industry group, functions in the WSN world much as the Wi-Fi Alliance does in relation to 802.11.

Harbor Research, an analyst firm watching the market, estimates there are fewer than 100,000 WSNs deployed worldwide today, with an average of about 14 or 15 nodes each. "But we do see that growing quite quickly," says Robin Duke-Woolley, one of the firm's UK-based principals. 

Harbor believes the number of deployments will grow at between 50 and 60 percent a year for the next five years, with the installed base topping 1.5 million by 2011. The number of nodes will grow more quickly, though, as companies deploy larger WSNs. (Sensicast has said it is deploying the first network with thousands of nodes, but so far is releasing few details about it.)

ON World, another research firm, estimated the installed base of WSN nodes in 2006 at two million. It also forecasts rapid growth, with sales of equipment and services in the global industrial and commercial WSN markets hitting $5 billion by 2011.

WSN applications range all over the map. "Wireless sensor networks can be used with any type of sensor connected to a wireless transceiver," says Duke-Woolley. "What they can do is limited, in a way, only by the imagination."

As we saw in an earlier article about mote maker Moteiv Corp., WSNs are being used in agribusiness to monitor growing conditions of high-margin crops such as wine grapes and trigger automated irrigation systems. 

There are more applications, though, in industry—for monitoring equipment in factories, for example, to get early warning of potential productivity-reducing machine failures, or for monitoring gas and oil pipelines.

According to ON World, the single biggest use of WSNs today is for automatic meter reading. Utility companies use them to aggregate data from many meters—electric, water, gas—in business and residential complexes and funnel it to a data center system for processing.

Such systems eliminate manual meter reading and can also provide real-time feedback to users that may help them reduce energy consumption.

Sensicast focuses primarily on "information-intensive manufacturing processes," Ambrosino says – situations where "there's useful information generated in the process that drives immediate decisions about managing the process."

Some show a rapid return on investment. One Sensicast customer, Hollingsworth & Vose, a paper manufacturer, saw a 30 percent reduction in energy costs—a savings of $30,000 a year—after deploying a $12,000 Sensicast WSN to monitor efficiency of compressed air systems that drive its machines.

The sensors detect air leaks and other easily repairable mechanical failures that in the past could only be detected by close inspection, a prohibitively costly undertaking.

Another customer, an aluminum plant, deployed a WSN to monitor and control temperature levels and boost efficiency in the cooling step of its cold metal rolling process. It resulted in a six million-pound annual increase in production. "And that drops right to bottom line," says Ambrosino.

Many Sensicast deployments, especially in the pharmaceutical and food processing industries, help customers stay in compliance with FDA (Food & Drug Administration) regulations for safe operating conditions.

But Sensicast believes its data center application will have much broader appeal. Many computer equipment manufacturers establish ranges of safe operating conditions for their products – mainly minimum and maximum temperature and humidity levels – which customers must comply with in order for vendor warranties to remain in effect.

The Sensicast product will measure conditions in various places in a data center, and also at specific places in an equipment stack. It can send alerts to data center managers if levels fall out of compliance with vendor conditions, and it stores readings in an archive.

"It's not just telling you whether the equipment is running hot or cold," Ambrosino says. "[The sensor data] is also made part of a record. Now when the equipment is returned to Dell or HP or whoever for warranty repairs, the customer is able to show that record and prove they did stay in compliance."

He predicts that the data center application could be part of a "compliance cash cow" for the WSN industry.

Sensicast may be in a unique position to exploit the opportunity. It is one of the only companies in the industry that develops, builds and markets all the components in a WSN – motes, network infrastructure equipment and mesh networking software. Others make one or a few components or integrate components to create end-to-end solutions.

The company has already deployed WSNs for more than 100 customers. Ambrosino says Sensicast WSNs compete very favorably against wired sensor networks – which have been around for years – and also WSNs sold by big industrial competitors such as Honeywell, Siemens and Emerson. The company's main competitive advantage: cost.

The cost to deploy a Sensicast WSN works out to between $100 and $500 per node on average. Costs for adding nodes scale up linearly, Ambrosino says, and the cost to add additional sensors to an existing node can be even less than the per-node cost.

WSN's are much less expensive to deploy than wired networks because of reduced installation costs. Mareca Hatler, director of research and senior market analyst at ON World, says WSNs are up to 90 percent less expensive to install. And Ambrosino claims his company's products are a quarter the price of his big WSN competitors.

The market has been evolving over the last year to 18 months. In the past, marketing WSNs was an evangelical undertaking, he says. But more customers know about the technology now and how they can benefit from it, and more are issuing RFPs (requests for proposal) rather than waiting to be sold by companies like Sensicast.

"We're definitely getting to the tipping point," Ambrosino says. "We're not quite there yet, but I think it will happen pretty quickly now."

IT managers may be the key to moving the market to that next level. Many will deploy WSNs to monitor data centers, he predicts—"and then they'll start saying, 'How could we use this same technology for different applications in our organization?'"