Contract calls for wireless sensor network

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Mar 11, 2008

Mesh networking technology from Newtrax offers a decentralised ad hoc architecture combined with frequency hopping spread spectrum RF links.

Newtrax Technologies has been selected as an industry partner for the Self Healing Autonomous Sensor Network (SASNet) technology demonstration project established by the Communications Research Centre (CRC), a branch of Industry Canada, and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC).

This contract, estimated to $1.5 million over a 30-month period, was awarded to Newtrax to provide a battery-powered wireless sensor network platform over which SASNet will be built.

To meet the needs of contemporary operations, the Canadian Forces require ground-based wireless sensor networks that can perform integrated surveillance tasks to detect, classify and localise hostile forces 24-hours a day in all weather conditions.

Although current unattended ground sensor systems can achieve some of these objectives, advances in ad hoc sensor network communications, packaging, and networking and sensing technologies are required to obtain cost-effective, easily deployable, remotely configurable, and accurate surveillance systems.

The mesh networking technology from Newtrax offers a decentralised ad hoc architecture combined with frequency hopping spread spectrum RF links that provide the most resilient, scalable and flexible platform needed for building low cost and low power UGS.

Furthermore, each mesh node can be tuned to operate anywhere between 100MHz and 1GHz.

This flexibility in frequency band of operation enables a cost-effective way to maximise RF propagation while minimising probability of detection or interception.

"We are very excited that Newtrax has been selected as the industry partner for SASNet".

"We believe this is a testament to the unique strengths and capabilities of our battery-powered wireless mesh/FHSS networking technology", says Alexandre Cervinka, Founder and CEO of Newtrax Technologies.

"Newtrax nodes autonomously build routing tables and can provide the embedded application with ad hoc multihop unicast and broadcast services".

"Other WSN systems require a central network co-ordinator for multi-hop communications, which creates a single point of failure and limits scalability".

The concept of SASNet is to use a large number of basic inexpensive and expendable sensors such as RF, acoustic, seismic, passive infrared and magnetic sensors that can cue more complex and expensive sensors such as electro-optical imaging devices.

In addition to providing the battery-powered mesh networking platform for SASNet, Newtrax will also provide its patent-pending RF Tripwire sensor which will act as a vigilant sensor to trigger more complex and power hungry sensors.

This unique intrusion detection system monitors signal strength variation between two nodes using the same radio components used for communications.

Algorithms perform trend analysis on the received signal strength to create a tripwire that is immune to the presence of vegetation or small obstacles between the pair of nodes.