In another significant step forward in promoting the use of so-called smart objects across a broad spectrum of business and personal use, the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects Alliance reports that it completed a successful global demonstration of IP-connected physical objects at the NetWorld+Interop 2009 show in Las Vegas.

The IPSO Alliance, formed last fall, is an organization of leading networking technology providers seeking to establish Internet Protocol as the standard of choice for the interconnection of physical objects.

At the NetWorld show, the IPSO Alliance interoperability demonstration linked sensors globally to a business intelligence application provided by SAP which then fed results to a graphical application displayed at the IPSO Alliance booth in Las Vegas. This enabled those attending the show to view the sensor data in real time streamed from ten locations in Korea, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, England, Canada, Colorado, Nevada and California.

Over the course of the three day event the IPSO Alliance collected over 100,000 temperature, humidity and light readings from the sensors spread over the three continents.

Each node in the demonstration communicated using IPv6 directly between the sensor nodes without the use of proprietary protocols, gateways or translators. The entire infrastructure of the demonstration utilized off- the-shelf hardware and pre-existing Internet framework – clearly showing the benefits of using internet protocol for this purpose.

Because the Internet is used as the underlying infrastructure by the IPSO Alliance actual deployment of the technology can be many orders of magnitude larger than the demonstration with no negative impact on the quality of results. The technology scales easily to tens of thousands or millions of nodes. Further, many of the sensor nodes in use for the demonstration were battery operated and cost less than $6 in quantity making existing technology supported by IPSO readily affordable for enterprise and home use.

“What we've shown here isn't what will be available at some future date, but what is here now and readily available to any consumer,” commented Geoff Mulligan, Chairman of the IPSO Alliance. “Our success at the NetWorld event is similar to that from the earlier Palo Alto Interop Event, but on a wider scope.”

“Participating companies from multiple global locations demonstrated interoperability between different PHY layers while continuously updating the servers. Of particular interest to visitors at the NetWorld event was that IPv6 stacks can run in such small embedded devices,” Mr. Mulligan added.

“Everything just worked,” noted Niels Thybo Johansen, Vice President of Research & Development at Sigma Designs.

Absolutely,” added Eric Gnoske, Colorado Springs Wireless Applications Manager at Atmel. “We arrived, plugged our 6in4 routers into the switch, configured the routers, brought our networks up and were sending data to the SAP and IPSO servers in just minutes.”

Products utilized during the test came from IPSO Alliance member companies Arch Rock, Atmel, Cisco, Dust Networks, Freescale, GainSpan, Jennic, Nivis, SAP, Sensinode, SICS, and Sigma Designs.

With applications ranging from home and commercial building automation, smart metering, factory monitoring, and data center energy management, these demonstrations underscore the flexibility, scalability and low power operation of IP-based smart object networking solutions – all available today.

About the IPSO Alliance

Intended to complement the efforts of entities such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which develop and ratify technical standards in the Internet community, the IPSO Alliance performs interoperability tests, documents the use of new IP-based technologies, conducts marketing activities and serves as an information repository for users seeking to understand the role of IP in networks of physical objects. IPSO Alliance membership is open to any organization advocating an IP-based approach to connecting smart objects. For more information, visit www.ipso-alliance.org.