02-05-2013, 02:37 PM
The X-Internet - Connecting the Physical World with the Cyber World
The X-Internet.pdf (Size: 344.16 KB / Downloads: 30)
Executive Summary
In just 20 years, the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we live,
learn, do business and entertain ourselves. What makes the Internet so
revolutionary is that it provides a standard way for people to connect
anywhere around the world.
Now, the Internet is entering a new generation of Seamless Mobility,
thanks to affordable mobile devices that take advantage of new options
and increased coverage for wireless connectivity. Standards-based wireless
technologies and infrastructure are growing at a rate that promises to
completely remove all remaining barriers to truly seamless personal
interaction and knowledge transfer.
But even a ubiquitous wireless Internet isn’t the complete fulfillment of the
Seamless Mobility revolution. Today’s Internet connects people to people,
providing information in text, video, sound and other formats intended for use
by people. The next step is to Internet-enable physical objects — connecting
people with things and even things with things.
The Extended Internet, or X-Internet, will enable connectivity not just
between people and their computing devices, but between actual, everyday
things like windows, highways, bananas, pets, appliances and more. By
enabling connectivity for virtually any physical object that can potentially
offer a message, the X-Internet will affect every aspect of life and business
in ways that used to be the realm of fantasy — or even beyond fantasy.
Motorola is leading the way in making the X-Internet a reality. This white
paper looks at the concepts, standards and technologies that are driving the
X-Internet, and some of the application areas that Motorola is contributing to,
now and in the coming years.
Introducing the Future: The Extended Internet
Twenty years ago, it was almost unimaginable how the brick-sized cell phone device that
some top-level businesspeople were using would soon change our lives. A few years later,
when e-mail was introduced, it was hard to imagine all the information, entertainment,
convenience and communication that today’s Internet would bring. Similarly, the X-Internet
can be difficult for people to “get” upon first hearing about it.
But, without a doubt, the X-Internet will transform lives and businesses in much more
powerful ways than the PC or even today’s Internet itself. Today’s Internet connects people
to people. Oftentimes it’s not a direct connection, but think about it: retail sites, databases,
games, content, search engines and more are all ultimately created by people, using
display formats that make sense to people, with the sole purpose of serving other people.
The X-Internet goes much further: It adds connectivity for physical objects, creating a
wealth of new opportunities for intelligent interaction between people and things, and even
between things and other things.
Like pieces of a puzzle, many of the enabling technologies and early implementations are
already in place. Inexpensive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are being placed in
parts, products, access cards and more to uniquely identify each item. These passive tags
are tiny, inexpensive and require no battery power. Devices designed to read these RFID
tags can be placed in doorways, turnstiles, and other portals to track objects entering and
leaving the area.
By adding small, inexpensive, battery-powered radios to RFID tags, it becomes possible
to deploy more sophisticated tracking applications that cover a much larger area — for
example, tracking people and items throughout an entire building. In active RFID systems,
RFID tags broadcast their own signals rather than echoing a signal broadcast by the RFID
reader. This allows deployment of fewer, simpler, and more affordable readers, while also
enabling more sophisticated applications.
Advanced, cooperative wireless technology
The X-Internet will connect all kinds of things in all kinds of spaces. Mobility will be
the norm. That means, first and foremost, that the X-Internet will depend on pervasive
wireless connectivity. At the same time, different X-Internet applications will have different
requirements for radio frequency, range, data rate and cost — so cooperative wireless
technologies will be required to allow systems based on multiple standards to work
together seamlessly.
In an X-Internet enabled home, for example, low data-rate systems such as home
security, monitoring, and environmental control will share the same network that
streams high-bandwidth music, video, and games to entertainment devices throughout
the house. Enabling technologies for the X-Internet must automatically resolve the
differences between various radio technologies and communications protocols to allow
seamless interaction.
Context awareness
True seamlessness depends on the ability of devices and even inanimate objects to sense
their environment, and to communicate their own presence and context to other relevant
devices and objects. Depending on the application, context-aware nodes may sense:
• The technical environment, including what networks and devices are within range, what
RF standards are in use, what applications and content are available and so on. This
mode of awareness enables X-Internet nodes to automatically join available networks and
exchange data as required by the application.
• The physical environment, including aspects such as temperature, moisture, lighting,
vibration and equipment parameters. Many of these capabilities are already in use
today by manufacturing, distribution and other vertical enterprises. The X-Internet will
require similar capabilities to be distributed horizontallly across all kinds of objects —
exponentially expanding the types of data and relationships available for processing
to enable new kinds of business and personal applications.
• Human behavior, and other new categories of complex, highly integrated awareness.
Devices of the future will observe user behavior and monitor the environment to
seamlessly deliver the appropriate content and services. For example, the security
systems of the future might be able to automatically recognize the difference between
a resident and an intruder, notify the authorities, activate and control video cameras, lock
rooms containing valuables and more — all without requiring the user to configure and
activate the system manually.
Peer-to-peer awareness, self-organization and autonomous action
In addition to traditional connectivity via a higher-level infrastructure, true seamlessness
requires autonomous, peer-to-peer local awareness and connection between things
themselves. This peer-to-peer awareness is a new paradigm, beyond the remote sensing
and control that is rapidly becoming familiar today.
An important requirement for peer-to-peer awareness is the ability of networks to selforganize
and self-maintain. As devices and objects of all kinds become part of the global
X-Internet, the number of potential nodes will grow by orders of magnitude compared to
today’s Internet. With billions of nodes coming online, many of them mobile, networked
things will need the ability to sense available communication and control channels,
automatically joining the appropriate subnets and applications, without human intervention.
Nodes also need the ability to intelligently establish communications with other nodes
using the minimal number of “hops.” This could involve a relatively limited network, such
as wireless peer-to-peer hopping across the sprinkler controllers in your yard. Or it could
involve a global network in which a message takes a wireless hop or two to a nearby
access point, then travels to another access point halfway around the world via the wired
Internet, and finally takes another wireless hop to reach the target device.
Peer-to-peer sensing and interaction must also be complemented by traditional,
hierarchical control, when appropriate. Consider the example of an X-Internet traffic
control system (Figure 1). Peer-to-peer awareness and autonomous action allow the
system to instantly coordinate signals for optimum traffic flow, without requiring human
intervention. At the same time, hierarchical control enables the system to send information
back to traffic engineers that helps them diagnose chronic traffic problems and plan future
road projects accordingly. Depending on the application, the X-Internet will require a flexible
mix of both autonomous and human-driven control.
Energy efficiency and self-generation of power
New sensing, control and radio technologies need the ability to operate in the field for very
long times while consuming very little power — or even scavenging all the power they
need from the environment. Many X-Internet devices will still use battery or line power,
but new types of nodes will be deployed by the thousands — often in extremely small
packages and difficult locations — making it difficult or impossible to change batteries.
New energy-scavenging technologies will enable nodes to operate indefinitely without
batteries. An emerging generation of photovoltaic technology will allow so-called “solar”
cells to operate using the ambient light in your house — and the cells will be small enough
to incorporate invisibly in windows and even paint. Other technologies will enable nodes to
scavenge energy from thermal energy, kinetic motion and other environmental sources.
As an example, the HVAC system of the future might have X-Internet sensors installed
at various locations on your house ducting. These sensors could extract energy from the
vibrational motion of the ducts themselves, using that energy to monitor temperature,
humidity and air quality. The system would keep conditions ideal without requiring you to
constantly fiddle with the thermostat, and it would even alert you when thresholds are
exceeded indicating that it’s time to change air filters or perform other maintenance.
New form factors
Finally, new form factors will be required to enable nodes that can be deployed in virtually
any environment. Today’s wireless security sensors that are typically placed adjacent
to window and door frames will, in the future, be part of the frame itself. Sensors that
can survive caustic environments and extreme temperatures will enable new kinds of
applications for industrial control, agriculture, traffic management, homeland security,
climate modeling and more.
Small, affordable sensors will be developed that can be embedded in commodity products —
similar to RFID tags, but with additional capabilities that include intelligent sensing, control
and connectivity. Sensors that can be injected subcutaneously or even ingested orally
by animals and people will enable new methods of healthcare monitoring, emergency
response and other similar applications.
The X-Internet is also a natural environment for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)
and nanotechnology to flourish and reach their full promise. This frontier of science and
technology focuses on the automatic assembly of extremely small “smart” particles
and devices — measuring from a millimeter to a millionth of a millimeter or even smaller
in size. At these scales, objects can have very different physical properties than larger
objects, offering exciting potential for new applications in materials engineering, healthcare,
geophysics, computing, telecommunications, energy and many other fields.
For example, microelectromechanical sensors with integrated wireless communications
may one day enable “smartdust” networks. These networks would be analogous to
traditional sensor networks, but with sensors that are microscopic in scale and affordably
deployable by the millions. At home, these technologies might allow builders to incorporate
environmental-control, security and other types of networks invisibly within building
materials. In the military, smartdust might be used to invisibly perform enemy surveillance,
track troop movements, or detect radioactivity and poisonous gas. And the potential
applications in other fields are virtually unlimited.