The Embedded Internet

Why are we so confident that the Embedded Internet is inevitable? It’s because of the confluence of two well-established phenomena: Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. Moore’s Law says that silicon devices become exponentially cheaper over time. Metcalfe’s Law says that networked devices become exponentially more valuable. So it follows that device networks built using wireless silicon radios become cheaper and more valuable over time. Does it get any better than this?

This is what got us so excited when we first started researching Device Networking: if you build devices that use silicon radios to form networks (and not just point-to-point connections), both Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law come into play. We knew back then that the silicon radios—expensive at the time—would become cheaper. And we knew that building on top of standards—in our case, ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4—would promote large-scale adoption predicted by Metcalfe’s Law.

In early 2003, we held up “networked streetlamps” as a slightly futuristic example of Device Networking: a tiny wireless mesh network node embedded in each streetlamp within a city would control and monitor that streetlamp. It could report on when a lamp is burned out (a threat to safety) or stuck on during the day (a waste of energy). But more than that, the wireless devices would blanket the city with a dependable wireless mesh network to be used by municipal and consumer services: utility meter reading; tracking buses and delivering content to bus tracking; monitoring traffic flow; locating available parking spaces.

Skeptics snickered at us: radio modules were too expensive, wireless communication was unreliable, and providing a wireless service using streetlamps as a backhaul was clearly just another of those weird Media Lab pie-in-the-sky projects.

Since then, however, Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law have worked their magic, and today Sunrise Technologies is installing Ember Corporation’s ZigBee radios into streetlamps to create a municipal backhaul—the system has already been deployed in a pilot program in Taunton, MA.

So it’s not a matter of if Device Networking will become prevalent, it’s only a matter of when. As MIT professor, advisor and friend Andy Lippman says “We’re never wrong, we’re just sometimes ahead of our time.” Good words to live by.

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