Technology
Technology

Arch Rock products and technology enable new wireless sensor applications to be developed in familiar environments, delivered on a wide range of embedded hardware platforms, and integrated with the enterprise. Drawing together three major advancements: industry standard IP-based, multi-hop mesh networking, powerful embedded systems and flexible web services computing architectures, Arch Rock has created the foundation to network the physical world.

A New Class of System

Arch Rock creates cutting-edge wireless sensor networks out of industry standard embedded hardware. Typical wireless sensor nodes consist of a processor, radio, storage, communication links, a power source, and any of a wide range of sensors. Continual advances in semiconductor chips has provided the transistors that form powerful desktops and servers, and has also has made rich functionality available within the cost and form-factor constraints of embedded microcontrollers. Furthermore, the sophisticated manufacturing techniques that put a million transistors on a dollar's-worth of silicon are now used to create other kinds of devices, including CMOS radios and MEMS sensors. Thus, while the personal computer shrinks into the cell phone and PDA, creating the wireless client, the embedded microcontroller is growing into a new class of hardware, the wireless server.

IP Access and Management for Seamless Internet Extension

Arch Rock provides access to wireless sensor networks as well as to individual sensor nodes using the standard, ubiquitous Internet Protocol (IP). Arch Rock node can be configured with an IP address, a DNS name, and accessed using standard HTTP over TCP/IP protocols. The company was a key contributor to the IETF 6LoWPAN (now RFC 4944) working group that addressed the challenge of enabling wireless IPv6 communication over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radios and was the first company to launch the first product based on the standard.

The unique level of IP-based technology and integration gives Arch Rock customers the ability to access and manage their sensor networks using the familiar paradigms of TCP/IP networking and the Internet, thus dramatically reducing operating costs and learning curves while increasing the reliability and extensibility of their networks.

The Challenge of Embedded Networking and Systems

Arch Rock offers rapid, energy-efficient, and reliable information dissemination, collection, and routing over industry standard links, including IEEE 802.15.4. While the wireless sensor node is the building block, the network delivers the application. Point-to-point wireless links present a number of challenges. The power required to communicate by radio grows as a polynomial of the distance, so where energy is limited each communication "hop" must be relatively short. In addition, individual links experience errors due to interference, obstructions, and other factors.

To overcome these challenges, Arch Rock embedded networking allows for every node to serve as a router, relaying data hop-by-hop along a reliable path. Networking services continuously monitor the state of the network and adapt the routing paths. Reliability is enhanced by link, network, and transport level techniques. Furthermore, patent-pending power management techniques are used to minimize the energy spent in communication, without relying on complex preplanning and scheduling that reduce the flexibility of the network.

Multi-Tier Architecture

Arch Rock's product platform (PhyNet™) utilizes a tiered architecture, which eliminates the need to co-located individual sensor networks with the server-based functions that control them. It does this by placing a scalable internetworking tier - the first "WSN router" - between them. Sensor applications now can reside in the next room, across a campus or half a world away, communicating with any number of discrete WSNs across LANs or WANs. PhyNet is enterprise-ready in that individual sensor nodes and whole WSN meshes can be deployed in a manner dictated by business needs, not by the constraints of incompatible network technologies. Management services and applications can reside in a protected and highly available corporate data center, while sensor nodes and networking functions can be distributed as needed in faraway buildings.

The key to the PhyNet approach is a new router developed specifically for WSNs. The PhyNet Router forms an internetworking backbone between server-hosted applications and WSNs based on the IETF 6LoWPAN standard for IPv6 low-power communication over wireless personal-area networks. On one side, the PhyNet Router connects over LAN or WAN links to the PhyNet Server, which translates embedded sensor applications into web services and provides a suite of web-based applications for the setup, diagnostics and management of multiple WSNs. On the other side, the PhyNet Router connects over short-range, low-power IEEE 802.15.4 radio to a broad array of sensor nodes and/or the new Arch Rock IPserial Node.

Web Services for Interoperability and Ubiquity

Arch Rock ties sensor networks into the Internet through numerous links such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, GPRS, and GSM. More importantly, the information provided by these networks will integrate with a wide variety of applications and enterprise data management infrastructures through standard web services. Each node, or even entire networks, can be viewed as a Web-based application server. Rather than require particular, preconfigured applications, the web services descriptions, discovery, and bindings are produced automatically from simple application annotations. Application services can be built by authoring simple business logic and pushing it into the appropriate tiers of the Arch Rock embedded network infrastructure so developers need not grapple with the complexities of embedded programming.

Much as web services architectures unify disparate information processes within and between enterprises, Arch Rock embedded web services provide interoperability, enhanced reliability, and composibility with diverse sources of physical information.

Building on an Open Operating System

The Arch Rock solution builds upon years of development by an international community of TinyOS developers to give embedded application development a level of functionality currently found in routers and networked servers, while respecting the strict resource constraints and high reliability requirements of embedded designs. Using the open standard interfaces developed within the TinyOS alliance the Arch Rock embedded operating system works across a wide range of leading hardware platforms, while preserving the full capabilities of each platform. Arch Rock also provides a simple driver framework to support the incorporation of new sensors across multiple platforms. Sophisticated compiler techniques shield applications and system services from platform dependencies while providing powerful performance optimizations and enhancing reliability through whole-system correctness analysis. Taken together, the Arch Rock system software technology provides the foundation for reliably and efficiently gathering, processing, and relaying streams of physical information on embedded hardware.