Main WINE fields of application are Wireless Sensor Networks. Implements a wireless clustered mesh network topology.
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History
WINE was developed starting from 2002 by Maurizio Corino and Paolo Zebelloni, founders of C-Labs, a company oriented to development of industrial applications, like process monitoring, condition monitoring, asset management, Environment, Health and Safety (EH & S) monitoring and power management.
They are headquartered in Turin, Italy.
WINE has been presented at International Wireless Summit 2005 - WPMC'05, in Aalborg (DK).
WINE is a patented technology grant in USA, Canada, Europe, Israel, New Zealand and Australia. Patents cover the time synchronization method used to keep network nodes time-aligned, providing a near 3 order of magnitude reduction in power consumption.
Technical Background
In wireless networks the most important challenge, media sharing, has been historically approached designing either beaconed or unbeaconed media access protocols.
In a beaconed network, a particular node (the base-station) provides time synchronization cyclically transmitting sync frames that other (slave) nodes use as timing reference for accessing the media: GSM mobile networks work in this way. In an unbeaconed network there is no synchronization, so the recipient must be ready to receive any frame, just acknowledging it.
Previous approaches may not be applicable when the network has more than one of the following constrains:
- two-way communication between nodes is a must;
- base-station and nodes share the same power requirements;
- there are limitations in transmit/receive duty-cycle (like in most part of the European 868 MHz ISM band);
- data latency must be short.
WINE, with its time-synchronous approach, complies with all constraints listed above.
WINE Features Chart
WINE implements a lot of nice capabilities:
- Ultra Low Power
- Safety and reliability by design
- Insensitive to neighbor networks issues
- Crypto with Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) in CBC mode
- Frequency Hopping
- Dynamic Tx Power trimming
- Network Latency 0.5 [s] per hop (typical)
- Works on all ISM bands (<1GHz, 2.4 GHz)
- Full ETSI compliance in all ISM bands
- Up to 65534 mesh nodes
- Up to 255 hops
- 15 application profiles
- Sub-millisecond network-wide common time reference
- Battery Powered Routers
- Portability (pure “C” code, no assembly)
- Small foot-print (full stack < 13 [KB] on MSP430 core)
- Modulation scheme independent
Software Architecture
WINE is based on Brain-Like Nano Kernel (AKA B-LiNK), a very powerful micro-controller oriented software architecture, designed to handle low-power states and CPU states transitions.
B-LiNK is based on a neural information processing model described by Giovanni Jervis (1933-2009), professor at La Sapienza University (Rome). The basic idea is that brains process information in the same way, independently from their complexity. The human brain may process a lot of information, the one of a bee not so many, but enough to survive.
Licenses
WINE is a patented technology. Technological Transfers and License Programs are available on request. For more information, please contact C-Labs.