On the Internet of Things

Dear Blog,

My dearest apologies for ignoring you, I have been uncharacteristically quiet for the last year. Luckily, I made a new year resolution to shape up, and pay you due attention. The Internet of Things definitely deserves it. After some time of indecision between this Blog, Google+ and Linkedin, I have decided I’m not much for short posts or tweets, except for announcements. I am going to refocus the Internet of Things blog, and focus on sharing short tutorials and insight into new technology and standards efforts for IoT.

2011 was an incredible year in the IoT industry and at Sensinode. We put a huge effort into driving IPv6 and Web technology for the community with efforts like ZigBee IP, SEP2.0, IETF CoRE and ETSI M2M, which are finally showing results. In 4Q/2011 Sensinode launched a whole new solution called NanoServices for efficient IoT web services end-to-end, and we’re extremely excited about it.

Zach

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

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

I attended the 75th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Stockholm last week. Here is some of the latest news from IETF activities related to the Internet of Things:

6LoWPAN - The 6lowpan working group is currently moving four Internet-Drafts towards last call in the standards track (Improved Header Compression, 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery) and informational track (Use Cases, Routing Requirements). I presented the latest ND draft, which has good consensus and will be going through a round of technical improvements within 2 weeks. Next the WG is looking to re-charter to continue on subjects such as security, MIBs etc.

ROLL – The roll working group presented the RPL (pronounced “ripple”) routing protocol draft, which has been accepted as an official working group document today. This will be the basis for routing over low-power and lossy networks including 6LoWPAN, which still needs lots of contribution to reach a full solution.

New 6lowapp effort - We held a very successful meeting about applications in resource-constrained networks. About 60-70 people attended presentations from Carsten Bormann, Don Sturek (from Pacific Gas & Electric and ZigBee/IP) along with a set of 2-minute stand-ups. The presentation is available here. The feedback from IETF Area Directors was that there is obvious support, motivation and requirements (and that we are in a hurry) – so start working! A 6lowapp mailing list and wiki page will be coming soon, keep tuned.

There was a great presence at the IETF from IPSO members, who held several meetings during the same week. Thanks to the move of ZigBee and the energy industry towards all-IP smart energy we say many new participants in Stockholm. It is really positive to see the collaboration between the IETF, IPSO, ZigBee and Utilities in this area.