Ubi Summer School – Apply by March 15th
Last summer I had the pleasure to teach a workshop on embedded Internet technology organized in Oulu, Finland – Sensinode’s headquarters is located in the same city. We had a great set of students, and did some of the worlds first CoAP implementations together.
At the end of May the Ubi Summer School will be held again, and I will be teaching a totally new course on embedded web services. This will concentrate on the web architecture, and applying it to M2M networks using the new IETF CoAP, W3C EXI and other leading technologies. There is still room left, so apply now! By the way, looks like the students had a lot of fun last year (but don’t tell that to your boss or professor 
).
Zach Shelby
Webinar on Embedded Web Services
Yesterday I presented an IPSO Webinar together with Gilman Tolle (Cisco) on Embedded Web Services. Like the other IPSO Webinars, this is available as a recorded Webex event with both voice, slides and the resulting Q&A session.
In the Webinar I cover the web architrecture and how it is being extended for M2M applications on constrained devices and networks. The IETF CoRE standardization effort and an overview of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) are included. This is followed by a great Smart Energy example and a tutorial on Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) technology by Gilman.
In December IEEE Wireless Communiation published an article I wrote on Embedded Web Services as well, available here for IEEE Xplore subscribers.
We are currently working on an IPSO White Paper on embedded web services, so keep your eyes open.
2010 in review
Here is a handy summary of the “On the Internet of Things” blog in 2010, thanks to all my readers, I wish everyone a successful 2011!
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.
Crunchy numbers
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, there were 10 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 26 posts. There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb.
The busiest day of the year was May 11th with 165 views. The most popular post that day was ETSI M2M Standardization.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were sensinode.com, 6lowpan.net, readwriteweb.com, freaklabs.org, and wsnbuzz.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for zach shelby, zigbee ip, 6lowapp, 6lowpan vs zigbee, and etsi m2m.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
ETSI M2M Standardization March 2009
1 comment
ZigBee vs. IPv6? February 2009
12 comments
6LoWPAN Book June 2009
19 comments
ZigBee announces IP adoption May 2009
4 comments
6LowApp – Embedded Application Protocols July 2009
11 comments
UBI Challenge 2010
Do you have a brilliant idea for a ubiquitous application? How does access to the worlds most advanced urban ubicom infrastructure and financial support sound?
The 1st International Open Ubiquitous City Challenge (“UBI Challenge” for short) challenges the global R&D community to design, implement, deploy end evaluate novel applications and services in real-world setting in the City of Oulu, Finland.
In addition to public interactive displays, an open WiFi infrstructure, and BT access points, Oulu has deployed the world’s first city-wide 6LoWPAN infrastructure using Sensinode’s NanoRouter products. See an infrastructure overview here.
Zach
IETF Maastricht
Greetings from pleasant Maastricht, where the 78th IETF is being held this week. A lot of exciting things are happening on the wireless embedded Internet! Here is a crash course:
The 6LoWPAN WG is finishing its main objectives of finishing the new Header Compression [draft-ietf-6lowpan-hc] and Neighbor Discovery [draft-ietf-6lowpan-nd] optimizations. We expect both drafts to start the proposed standard process soon. Samita Chakrabarti and I will be releasing a short white paper on the updated 6LoWPAN ND for the IPSO Alliance soon.
The new CoRE WG held its second meeting with great progress. In just 4 months a stable version of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [draft-ietf-core-coap] was developed, along with 10+ interoperable implementations at Plugfest events held this week. Anyone can participate, see the CoRE Plugfest page.
The ROLL WG is currently in progress, with a major milestone being achieved with the completion of last call on the Ripple (RPL) routing protocol [draft-ietf-roll-rpl]. Work is ongoing to complete the security and route metric specifications.
Smart Grid is a hot topic in the energy and communication industries, and the IETF has been active in supporting the energy industry with information on the use of IP. The IETF has a Smart Power interest group for all interested.
See you in Beijing!
CoAP-01 released, ready for a Plugfest?
Yesterday we released version -01 of the Constrained Application Protocol in the IETF. This new version is now a complete and stable specification based on a huge amount of work in the CoRE WG which closed 14 tickets, 10 intermediate drafts and did a lot of implementation testing. The draft is now available at:
A Plugfest is being organized at the upcoming IETF in Maastricht, Netherlands at the end of July for CoAP. The Plugfest is open for anybody to participate in, either on-site if you are attending the IETF, or remotely over the IPv6 or IPv4 Internet.This is an exciting step in realizing the Embedded Web, so do a little coding and get involved! Plugfest information available here:
Results from the Ubi Summer School
Oulu hosted a great international Ubi Summer School the first week of June, organized by Prof. Timo Ojala. The school attracted 77 great students from 22 countries. It was a please to be teaching a workshop there, and hope to see everyone again next year.
It all started with the 2nd Ubiquitous City Seminar, which included talks from the cross-disiplinary teachers of the workshops ranging from Context-awareness to Ubiquitous art. My talk titled “IP-based Sensor Networks and the Embedded Web” is available here. The audience of the seminar was one of the most interesting I have ever seen, with everyone from sensor network researchs to architects and even anthropologists attending. Needless to say the panel was a blast!
My workshop had 17 really motivated students. Together we worked hard for three days on two projects:
1. Design of the 6LoWPAN network deployment for the Oulu SensorCity deployment of 20 public 6LoWPAN access points in downtown Oulu, Finland. See their final presentation.
2. Based on a group idea competition, the whole class implemented an entire Ubiquitous Security demonstration using the new IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) in a mere 24 hours! The setup included QR Code based tag recognition, a RESTful access control design, a Web UI and custom implementations of a CoAP server and client. Best of all the students pulled off a live demonstration of the system in the workshop closing seminar. See their final presentation.
And see you there next summer!
SenZations Summer School
Late this summer the 5th SenZations Summer School on Applications of Smart and Connected devices will be held in Rijeka, Croatia. I will be giving a brand new seminar there on Embedded Web Services covering the exciting area of web services in sensor networks including the REST architecture, the Constrained Application Protocol and techniques for binary web service content. For the past two years (Slovenia and Macedonia) I have lectured at this workshop and can highly recommend it for graduate students in sensor and embedded networking!
For more information see http://www.senzations.net
UBI Summer School – Still time!
I will be teaching an IP-Based WSN workshop at the 1st International UBI Summer School held May 31st-June 4th in Oulu, Finland. The deadline has just been extended to April 30th – so still time to sign up! This summer school is highly recommended for those doing MSc or Phd work related to ubiquitous networks and computing, and consists of 6 top-notch workshops. There are still a few seats left in my workshop and three others.
http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-summer-school-2010
This summer school kicks off the UBI Challenge which encourages design, implementation and deployment of novel ubiquitous applications on the city of Oulu’s outstanding display and sensor network infrastructure. This will include a city wide deployment of 6LoWPAN 2.4 GHz and Sub-GHz access points!
REST and the Internet of Things
The recent IETF in Anaheim had a great kickoff of the new Constrained RESTful Environment working group. Applying the REST architecture to extend the Web to even the most constrained nodes and networks (and making that scale to a trillion nodes) is an exciting and challenging task. We have started some interesting protocol design on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP, pronounced “co-app”) – and it is nice to see this new transfer protocol taking shape!
Before diving into the protocol details of CoAP, I think it is important for people to explore what applying REST to constrained, autonomous embedded devices over really difficult networks really means. Lisa Dusseault, the previous IETF Apps Area Director who helped us get CoRE going, has started a brilliant series of blog entires about REST and the constrained world – keep an eye there!
- Lisa on why HTTP won’t do it
- Lisa on REST in protocols today
Recently I wrote an IEEE Communication Magazine article on Embedded Web Services, and we are working on a White Paper on the subject for the IPSO Alliance. In the mean time I’ll also be writing some blog entries on what REST means for this world.
