Section Title
Technology
The SynapSense Solution (SynapSoft 5.3) is comprised of sensing devices, gateways, routers, server platforms and a comprehensive modular software infrastructure that spans devices, routers and servers. These are based on a broad range of innovative technologies that provide clear differentiation for SynapSense products. By using a modular SW strategy that includes a robust development tool set and a high level programming model, SynapSense provides a new level of flexibility for its customers. This strategy provides a HW diagnostic platform that can easily be ported to leverage a broad range of off-the-shelf 8, 16, and 32 bit microcontroller options.
These differentiators provide our customers with a completely integrated data set from every key piece of equipment, enabling a new level of management analysis and intelligence. The results increase customer options and add versatility to our solution, while decreasing sensor solution costs.
The SynapSense Solution is built upon several key technology components. These include support for reliable and efficient multi-hop wireless networking, a platform independent device application development environment, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) integration services and data center application intelligence.
Multi-Hop & Reliable Wireless Sensor Network
The SynapSense wireless network infrastructure is designed to address the significant challenges posed by the environment in which WSN networks operate. These challenges arise from device and radio failures, network size, physical distribution of devices, and device inaccessibility. Our wireless networks are easy to deploy; they have low cost of operating and managing networks; and they are long lasting, reliable, and tolerant to failures. The following briefly describe the different characteristics of the SynapSense wireless network infrastructure.
Network Characteristics
- Self-organizing
- Self-healing
- Architecture Star, Tree, Mesh, Hybrid
- Data transport One-One, Broadcast
- Reliability end-to-end
- Power management configurable for low power operation
- Latency configurable for low latency support
- Global time management
- Standards 802.15.4 radios supported; Others: forthcoming
- Network Tools: health and status management; Network debugging support
Self-organization: SynapSense networks are fully self-organizing. Upon initiation, devices in the SynapSense network identify their neighbors and autonomously form a control and data network. Self-organization reduces the cost of administrating and managing networks. It also enables a network that can incrementally and dynamically adapt to the addition or removal of SynapSense sensing devices, routers and gateways.
Self-healing: SynapSense networks are self-healing in that they can adapt to disruptions in network connectivity. These disruptions arise due to device failures and/or radio connectivity losses. SynapSense networks recover from these failures by constantly monitoring the network for connectivity changes, and reorganizing the device network states so that alternate and redundant paths can be identified and used for future data and control transfers. SynapSense networks support formation of fairly general network graphs, which support many redundant paths among nodes. They are therefore more resilient to network connectivity failures. The SynapSense Solution supports many different forms of network topologies, including star, tree and mesh.
Reliability: The SynapSense network infrastructure supports reliable end-to-end data and control transport protocols. These protocols ensure that the network can recover from packet losses (due to RF interference, reflection, scattering, absorption, refraction, etc.) and device failures. This ensures that collected data is reliably transmitted to the base station where it can be stored and analyzed.
Long network lifetime: The SynapSense networking infrastructure supports a highly energy efficient network operation scheme that can be configured to operate in varying duty cycle modes. The network is intelligent in that it uses the scheduling of various network operations to determine how the device radios should operate. Given that radio operations consume the most energy, the fine-grained scheduling of radio operations ensures long battery life, thereby reducing network operation cost.
System and health management tools: The SynapSense infrastructure includes several tools that help plan, develop, deploy and manage networks. The tools provide information about the status of devices, network connectivity, and network traffic information. If configured, the tools also provide debugging information, which include device operation traces, network state, packet traces and failures characteristics.
Rich and Flexible Device Execution Environment
The SynapSoft™ 5.3 software environment implements a highly efficient execution environment that supports a variety of services for WSN applications. These services include dynamic resource management, persistent storage, concurrency, global time, remote application configuration, and application life cycle management. The software environment contains a programming model that builds upon the well known object- and component-based programming models, thereby requiring little programming and tool training for application developers. The programming model provides support for well-known WSN programming paradigms such as periodic, event-driven, and pull and push-based sensing and control.
SynapSense Device Software Environment
- Platform independence
- Platform scalability
- Concurrency Threading, Tasks, Events, etc.
- Synchronization, Blocking
- I/O
- Generic Sensor Driver Support
- Device Persistence
- Time management
- Memory management (Runtime)
- Runtime Power management
- Application life-cycle management
- Remote application configuration
- WSN application patterns Several (Event, Periodic, etc.)
Wide Array of Sensors and Sensor Platforms
The SynapSense device software environment supports scalable platform independent application development, which ensures that the same application can be run on a wide variety of platforms without requiring any changes in the application. SynapSense's solutions can be easily targeted to various CPUs, radios, and sensors. Our Solution can be tailored specifically to the requirements of a given application. Customers can select from a wide variety of off-the-shelf sensors supporting 0-10V and 0-20mA sensor interfaces. If more compute power is required, customers can select from 8, 16 or 32 bit microcontroller options.
Wireless Sensor Network Integration Services
Our Solution provides full data and control integration of the WSN within enterprise information systems. These include programmable alert systems, data visualization and charting capabilities, standard storage schemes, and remote sensor management through web services. SynapSense customers can use these services to collect data streams from different sensing points and store them in standard formats for data analysis and mining. Also, they can use these services to remotely control operation of devices, and integrate their operations within business processes.
Flexible and Programmable Alerts
Most forward thinking companies know that closely tracking their data center environment helps achieve business goals. The SynapSense Solution can provide alerts (SMS or email) to let you know when your attention is needed before warning signs become points of failure. Each alert is routed independently to ensure it reaches the right people, at the right time, giving the right result.
Data Reporting and Visualization
The SynapSense Solution includes several data reporting and visualization schemes. These schemes include support for real-time, historical, and aggregate data reporting. Our Solution allows customers to use a web browser to view the entire network, down to a specific sensing device, using the state-of-the-art SynapSoft 5.3™ visualization console.
Data Archiving & Retrieval
The SynapSense SW suite uses industry standards for storing and retrieving sensor and network data. These include support for XML-based representation of sensor data, and standard relational database products (such as MySQL and SQL Server). This provides customers with a complete data log of past conditions enabling improvements through comprehensive system optimizations.
Java & C-based Support for Platform Independent Application Development
The SynapSense WSN solution is extremely versatile and extends to the server side of the equation as well. The SynapSense solution integrates seamlessly into your enterprise, with support for MySQL or SQL Server; while standard Java and Web Applications ensure compatibility with the rest of your environment.
Enterprise Application Integration Support
The SynapSense SW tools provide SQL based data storage with a defined schema to make your data available to you while XML enables enterprise integration.
Learn more about SynapSoft 5.3 and related Product Specifications.