Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless becomes ubiquitous, Venture Technologies is at the forefront of the interconnection of distributed sensors.

Networks of wireless sensors (and controllers) are moving from high value, high cost applications to ubiquitous application. As the cost of adding wireless drops and the ability to make devices self powered enables “set & forget” applications, the benefits of WSNs are becoming apparent.

Self assembling networks of simple sensors combined with sophisticated analytics can infer valuable information from partial data. The volume and refresh makes up for the lower sensitivity and determinism of the network.

One issue that current implementations face is that mesh networks designed for universal application are not optimally efficient for any single application, resulting in compromises on battery life, energy harvesting requirements, cost or performance.

Venture Technologies’ RFOS Mesh networking modules are flexible to allow for optimized configurations. Here are some examples of application demands where this has proven to be critical to system performance:

  • Data only flows one way, but occasional commands or acknowledgement need to back-propagate.
  • Traffic in one direction is time sensitive, but not traffic in the opposite direction.
  • Certain data, on occasion, needs to be broadcast for near simultaneous response, but normally some latency is acceptable.

Powerful combinations of true mesh topologies with cascaded star topologies and switching between different frequency and time multiplexing schemes, combined with packet specific assynchronicity enables our designers to meet these complex demands, as in these examples.