Ismosys Unveils Ember’s IP Stack Roadmap for Smart Grid Applications

Date: 21/7/2011

- Ember’s new Internet Protocol (IP)-based low-power wireless networking stack targets smart metering & home area network (HAN) and smart grid applications.

Over the past two years Ember has invested significant engineering resources towards its commitment and vision of providing a reliable, code efficient, and high performance IP solution running on IEEE 802.15.4 radios, tailored to suit the characteristics and profile of scalable, low-power wireless networks. In pursuit of that, Ember has contributed to the great efforts being made by standards bodies such as IETF and the ZigBee Alliance, organisations that are working aggressively towards enabling native IP support for smart meters and HAN devices.  

According to Anil Chauhan, Ismosys Smart Metering Applications Specialist, a very early version of the Ember IP Stack has already been available to a limited group of customers: “Ember is progressively expanding the availability of the IP Stack to the wider customer  base of the coming months as features get added and the stack undergoes higher levels of testing“, Chauhan said.  “Ember's plans call for a Beta release of the stack in Q3 2011 followed by general availability by the end of the year”.”.

Ember is a global leader in standards-based, low-power wireless mesh networking technologies and its unmatched experience and expertise provides Ember with a strong understanding of the unique challenges and requirements of such networks. Ember has brought to bear that knowledge and experience, sharing test cases, performance data and code space information with its customers and Alliance partners. Ember has also co-authored an IETF routing protocol – RPL – for "low-power and lossy" networks and has made contributions to a number of IETF working groups such as 6LowPan, ROLL and CORE.

"We have been working hard within the standards bodies we are associated with to forge low-powered IP standards that constitute a reliable, scalable and secure platform to help consumers and utilities reduce energy consumption and their carbon footprint well into the future," said Bob LeFort, Ember's CEO. "Our existing and new customers need to start making important product design decisions for their next-generation devices and now is the right time to give them and the industry better visibility of our schedule and the path towards a standards-based IP solution."

Click here for detals of EmberZNet PRO ZigBee protocol software package, which contains all the elements required for robust and reliable mesh networking applications on Ember’s silicon.