Climate change and energy shortage, potentially, are demanding people to think twice now when they want to switch on their heating or air-conditioning. Rightly so, human has been too wasteful for too long. Gas gazzling vehicles for style, for recognition. Electronic equipments switched on all day long for no good reasons. My company has just participated in the “Big Switch Off” this weekend to see how much energy companies have wasted had they not switched off unused equipments over the weekend.

Question is, do we actually need such studies to learn that we should be switching off unused equipments? It does not matter how much current the equipment draws. If it is not needed, turn it off! Simple as that. Sometimes it is just frustrating to see human’s ignorant behaviours. Of course companies would want to save their fuel bills, especially now when the economy is doing so badly, jobs cutting everywhere, everyday. But it is when it becomes the companies’ job to persuade employees to save energy that it seems a bit laughable.

It’s the same at home. There are products in the market where people can plug them onto their power sockets to see how much energy they are consuming on their devices before they will decide whether or not they will want to use less of those devices, for example when not needed! They want information in their face before they will consider changing their behaviours. Switching off things is just too “time-consuming”, sigh, as if most of these people are always so occupied.

With such inconsiderate human behaviour, it almost becomes inevitable that it makes sense to “institutionalise” plans to save energy. For example new buildings to be built need to meet certain level of energy efficiency criteria before they will be approved. Good news is this will present opportunities and incentives for builders to come up with better building designs that are energy efficient, sustainable and environmental friendly. It is true that wireless sensor networks will probably come in quite handy in helping to improve building design. But I think it will mostly be in the arena of improving comfort rather than energy efficiency, unfortunately. Afterall building materials are limited and are well studied by the construction industry already?

As far as I am aware, off-the-shelf batteries are not designed for long lifetime use, in the order of years. Yet they are being used for long term deployment in WSN. I’ve seen theoretical projections of how long low power wireless motes can last. But there still seems to be an unknown quantity on the profiles of batteries, when used for a long time by wireless motes, drawing µA current…

More standardisation activities, this time to set sensor net standard for process control. Having a big say on how wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in a practical way at the moment, several industries from the automation and control sectors are trying to muscle in their own standards for WSNs. Notably the 30,000-member ISA trade group which focuses on factory automation.

On the other hand there are industries from the PC data side that try to extend Internet Protocol (IP) to WSNs. For example IETF’s Routing over Low-power and Lossy Networks (Roll) group which is pursuing a standard way for control and sensor nodes on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 802.15.4 nets to link to the broader Internet, interestingly backed by Cisco Systems.

It wasn’t that long ago when 3G network was touted to give mobile users broadband experience on the move. Till today, even though I have 3G capabled mobile phone, I still am not experiencing the “web surfing” experience I enjoy 7-8 years ago using my desktop machine. Whereas the speed of fixed line broadband has increased considerably over these years, the bandwidth you get from 3G connection has not really managed to catch up. It is a wonder if 3G can ever live up to the expectation they once jazzed up years ago.

Then there is the multi-hop ad hoc networks which threatened to compete with network operators’ infrastructure, extending the coverage of the last mile access and potentially squeezing the core networks. Thankfully after the telecom bubble, the hype surrounding this was much less than the 3G circus, but it is a networking concept that has captured many’s imagination initially. To be honest, it is still a very unique networking concept, and has shown to work, but just has not been good enough, yet again. It is more realistic at the moment to use it in a more static environment than trying to get it to work satisfactorily in an environment where every nodes can potentially move around.

So is the wireless sensor network. It seems to also come to a stage where the hype is slowly fading away and people are getting back to basic. Rather than trying to capture investors’ attention by telling them that, “hey, these little motes can be thrown out of the aeroplane and they can ’self-configure’ to form a network and propagate monitoring information back to the base station”, people are more prudent and use it in a more sensible way in the form of Zigbee network with a star topology for example. Multi-hop, long lifespan wireless sensor network is still some way from being ready for deployment.

Anyway the point is new technologies will keep emerging all the time. It’s good to feel excited about new technologies. But unless you are in the position to do something about the technologies, there’s no need to get overly distracted by the hype surrounding it, created by marketing people who don’t know that much about the technologies, yet somehow manage to leave a bad taste in many people’s mouth.

Having not been keeping in touch with news about WSN for 3 weeks while I was on holiday, I’m notified by my colleague today that SunSPOTs are now finally available in the EU area. But checking on their website myself, it seems that it costs much more to get a Sun SPOT development kit in Europe than in the US after currency conversion (€627 compared to $550 excluding tax), which is probably not news anymore given the fact that it’s almost always more expensive to buy goods in Europe than in the US. However Europeans can probably take heart from the news that they are soon going to change the pricing in the US from $550 to $750 (apparently as of 27th Feb 2008) Well, perhaps not, €627 is still a lot of money. Just shows that wireless sensor motes are still very much in the prototype stage.