July 29, 2010
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!
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Posted by zdshelby
July 9, 2010
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:
draft-ietf-core-coap-01
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:
CoRE Plugfest at IETF-78 in Maastricht
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Posted by zdshelby
June 17, 2010
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!
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Posted by zdshelby
May 4, 2010
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
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Posted by zdshelby
April 22, 2010
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!
http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-challenge
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Posted by zdshelby
April 9, 2010
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.
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Posted by zdshelby
March 11, 2010
The IETF approved a new working group today called Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE). This new group aims at specifying a RESTful web service protocol for even the most constrained embedded devices and networks. CoRE will be a major enabler for all kinds of sensor network, M2M and other Internet of Things applications!
CoRE WG Charter:
http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/core-charter.html
A very early Internet-Draft on the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) can be found here:
draft-shelby-core-coap-00
A bit of history behind this group. While writing 6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet we noticed with Carsten Bormann that embedded web services is one of the key missing components for realizing the Internet of Things. The EU project SENSEI noticed very much the same thing, and has developed an architecture and testbed for integrating Smart Objects into the web using a resource model. These together with the tremendous need for related solutions in the energy industry (e.g. Smart Energy 2.0) kicked us into action last summer at the IETF in Stockholm with an interest group called 6lowapp. This produced a tremendous amount of interest, a large number of Internet-Draft submissions and finally resulted in this new WG! Looking forward to the next year.
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Posted by zdshelby
March 4, 2010
The book exercises have (finally) been released at the 6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet website. This slide set includes an overview of embedded technology typically used in the Wireless Embedded Internet, an overview of embedded development and a short tutorial on Contiki. The slides currently include a small number of Contiki related exercises. Both the Contiki overview and exercises will be continuously updated, so check for updates!
Contiki programming exercises - Learn embedded development and 6LoWPAN programming with the open-source Contiki project
6LoWPAN Book Course Exercises (PPT) Updated 4.3.2010
6LoWPAN Book Course Exercises (PDF) Updated 4.3.2010
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Posted by zdshelby
February 17, 2010
I gave a book release seminar on Dec 6th at the Centre for Internet Excellence in Oulu, Finland. Thanks to the great hosts, we are now releasing the entire seminar in a really professional format on-line. The seminar gave a good overview of 6LoWPAN and the general contents of the book, covering about half of the course material slides and lasts for 80 minutes. Enjoy!
6LoWPAN Seminar Video (80 minutes, MP4) Recorded 6.12.2009
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Posted by zdshelby
December 23, 2009
For the past 6 weeks I have been a beta user of a new 6LoWPAN-based home energy pilot system from the UbiCity project called UBI-AMI (Ubiquitous Automatic Metering Infrastructure). I now have what is likely the world’s first 6LoWPAN controlled Christmas tree – turned on and off from a handy web interface. Nerdy, I know! This tops off lots of other useful things like controlling the car heater and fixing an energy guzzling freezer. More about UBI-AMI in 2010…
Merry Christmas to everyone!
6LoWPAN controlled Christmas tree
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Posted by zdshelby
