Crossbow Technology Releases Industry's First End-to-End, Low-Power, Wireless Sensor Network Solution for Security, Monitoring, and Tracking Applicati

SAN FRANCISCO -- Highly Reconfigurable XMesh(TM) Protocol Stack and MOTE-VIEW(TM) Software Enable TrueMesh(TM) Sensor Networks with 802.15.4 Support

Crossbow Technology, Inc. (www.xbow.com), the leading end-to-end solutions supplier in wireless sensor networks and the largest manufacturer of Smart Dust wireless sensors, announced today the release of two key software systems -- the XMesh(TM) Low-Power Mesh Protocol Stack and MOTE-VIEW(TM) client software for Wireless Sensor Network applications such as security, asset tracking, and monitoring. For the last three years, Crossbow's XMesh(TM) and MOTE-VIEW(TM) software systems have been used in large-scale customer deployments including major oil companies, warehousing automation, homeland security, and many more applications. Today, Crossbow is making these software systems available as off-the-shelf catalog products for the mass market.
Crossbow has a ten-year history of delivering sensors for applications and industries with the most stringent performance requirements in the harshest of environments. Crossbow's wireless mesh networking products, also known as Smart Dust, are being used to improve agricultural efficiency and growth, monitor and secure industrial plants and buildings, save environmentally sensitive lands, preserve national landmarks, mitigate earthquake and fire damages, and secure and protect the nation's natural resources. Crossbow is also a leading supplier of inertial sensor systems for aviation, land and marine applications and other instrumentation sensors.
XMesh(TM) Stack Enables Low-Power Sensor Networks

The Crossbow XMesh(TM) protocol stack is an open-architecture, flexible and powerful, embedded wireless networking and control platform built on top of the TinyOS operating system. XMesh(TM) software runs on every node or "mote" in a wireless sensor network. Using XMesh(TM), motes dynamically form a reliable mesh network between nodes using field tested and proven ad-hoc routing techniques. Crossbow's Minimum Transmission technology reduces the total number of radio messages throughout the network enabling XMesh(TM) software to run sensor applications with the lowest power consumption extending the sensor battery lives up to 5 years on simple AA batteries. Automatic and global mote time synchronization to within one-thousandth of a second, allows motes to shutdown except for scheduled communications. In addition to enhancing the battery life, Minimum Transmission technology also maximizes the bandwidth and reduces network traffic and latency. XMesh(TM) offers flexible topologies, including TrueMesh(TM) or true peer to peer operation with all motes running battery powered, along with a high-speed streaming service, multiple QOS levels, integrated network-health messages and over-air firmware upgrades.

The XMesh(TM) protocol stack is built on top of the 802.15.4 radio standard, and it runs on Crossbow's MICAz ZigBee-ready platform. The 2.4GHz MICAz mote processor radio module is Crossbow's FCC Certified, award winning hardware platform for wireless mesh networking. XMesh(TM) also runs on Crossbow's popular MICA2 and MICA2DOT family of 400 and 868/900MHz processor radio modules.

The XMesh(TM) protocol stack is written on top of the TinyOS operating system and using the TinyOS open-source development tool chain. The TinyOS operating system is the de facto standard for wireless sensor and embedded networking development, with well over 1,000 development teams worldwide.

MOTE-VIEW(TM) 1.0 Enables Easy-to-View Application Monitoring

MOTE-VIEW(TM) is the primary user-interface and client application between a user and a deployed network of wireless sensors motes. MOTE-VIEW(TM) is targeted to end-users as a complete end-to-end software suite to simplify deployment and monitoring. It provides an easy means of logging wireless sensor data to a database, analyzing and plotting sensor readings. Sensor data can be logged on a database resident on a host PC, or to a database running autonomously on a Crossbow Stargate remote network gateway.

MOTE-VIEW(TM) offers historical and real-time charting, topology map, network, and sensor-value gradient visualization, data export capability and printed report generation. For many users, MOTE-VIEW provides a turn-key deployment solution. MOTE-VIEW(TM) has been extensively used in field deployments prior to its official 1.0 Release. MOTE-VIEW(TM) is Windows(R) XP and 2000 SP4 compatible and written on top of the Microsoft .NET framework. MOTE-VIEW(TM) supports the Crossbow MICA platform of wireless sensor network hardware, including the MICA2, MICA2DOT, and MICAz Motes running the X-Mesh mesh network stack.

In addition, MOTE-VIEW(TM) supports Crossbow's wide range of sensor boards (MTS family), data acquisition boards (MDA family), and sensor packages (MEP family). These sensor boards allow for the monitoring of Light, Temperature, Relative Humidity, Passive RFID Tags, Vibration, Acoustic, Magnetic Field, Soil Moisture, and Soil Temperature parameters. Deployed systems include physical security, environmental monitoring, industrial control, energy management, and building automation.