Physical Analytics - Mote Technology
Description: IBM's Low-Power Mote Technology (LMT) is a wireless sensor/actuator technology that is part of IBM's Measurement and Management Technologies (MMT) and alos the Physical Analytics platform. In particular, LMT is an ultra-low power communication system with motes having an expected battery lifetime of 5 years—including the sensors/actuators—focused on controlling or sensing environmental phenomena—temperature, relative humidity, air flow—and contaminants. There are multiple applications of the technology, for example: museums, data centers, telecommunication facilities.
By design, LMT is highly modular, that is a mote can be adapted to different applications with a variety of different sensors and actuators. Each mote is powered by batteries, thus is completely untethered. A typical deployment of LMT has three components: the wireless motes, the network manager, and a software agent. The wireless motes monitor and/or control the environment and form a reliable mesh network. The mesh network is controlled by the network manager, that also has the function to interface with the external world, as a gateway. The software agent links the network manager and the MMT server, and it allows for real-time wireless data gathering.
For the physical layer and media access control, LMT uses a radio compliant with IEEE 802.15.4 standard, at 2.4 GHz frequency. This standard is ideal for low-rate wireless personal area networks. The network layer is based on WirelessHART, an open-standard wireless networking protocol widely used in industrial environments. All the communication has AES-128 bit encryption. A 16-bit ultra-low power processor is the core of LMT. This processors includes multiple inputs and outputs, enabling the flexibility of our motes. Among other, LMT includes Digital I/O, Analog I/O, plus all the main IC communication protocols: I2C, SPI, UART. High quality sensors perform the accurate measurements of IBM Low-Power Mote Technology. The sensors/actuatros are compact and low-power, allowing for motes with long lifetimes. Being able to support a large variety of sensors and transducers is important to allow for a flexible platform.
News:
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Recent press:
- EE Times (Photos from the Frontier: Internet of Things)
Key patents:
- Wireless network of low power sensing and actuating motes (US Patent Application 20140257754)
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