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The Power of Wireless Sensor Networks
By delivering detailed data about the physical world, sensor networks can vastly enrich our understanding of how the world works, opening the door to entirely new computing applications. For example, sensor networks could provide precise information about crops in real time, enabling agribusiness to reduce water, energy, and pesticide usage and enhancing environment protection. In industrial settings, they could be used to monitor equipment continuously and predict equipment failure, or the need for maintenance, with far greater precision, enabling companies to avoid costly equipment failures or shutdowns of production lines. These are just two of the growing number of potential applications of sensor network technology.
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Intel Research: Proactive Agriculture, Sensor Networks for Understanding Site Variability
Agriculture is a domain that we believe is one of the areas most likely to include early adopters of wireless sensor networks. Our early work with agriculturalists showed that sensor networks could play a role in preserving the environment by reducing water and pesticide usage. They can also provide early alerts for frost damage and help in precision harvesting to maximize quality. These theoretical benefits needed to be tested in the field. Since then, we have worked with agricultural scientists on a long-term deployment of a wireless sensor network in a wine grape vineyard. By densely monitoring climatic conditions we were able to show that differences within a site are substantial and often cannot be predicted by statistical models. Some of the benefits of the development of this technology include improving crop quality and, thereby, enhancing the value of the crop. The same infrastructure can also be used to give performance support for use in precision agriculture. Perhaps more significantly, this technology can also help farmers to feed the expanding population of the nations of the world by increasing the viability of semi-arable lands. This technology brings computation outside the predictable domains of office automation, and allows researchers and practitioners to address other types of knowledge work, in this particular case - farming. This project begins to address fundamental research issues outside the boundaries of its own core technology.
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Low Power. Why low power modules?
More of today's RF applications require battery power, so the lower the output power the better. However, low output power compromises the communication range available in most RF solutions. The key to a great RF solution is to find a product that provides long range at low output power. MaxStream wireless OEM modules provide excellent communication at short and long range while maintaining low output power. How is long range made available at such low power? The high-performance range properties of MaxStream's wireless OEM modules are achieved by proprietary radio frequency (RF) technology coupled with excellent receive sensitivity properties. The receive sensitivity of MaxStream's wireless OEM modules provide 4 times the range of industry averages for similarly powered 900 MHz and 2.4
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Overview of Sensor Networks.
Wireless sensor networks could advance many scientific pursuits while providing a vehicle for enhancing various forms of productivity, including manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and transportation.
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