The Intel® mote platform: a Bluetooth-based sensor network for industrial monitoring

The Intel mote is a new sensor node platform motivated by several design goals: increased CPU performance, improved radio bandwidth and reliability, and the usage of commercial off-the-shelf components in order to maintain cost-effectiveness. This new platform is built around an integrated wireless microcontroller consisting of an ARM*7 core, a Bluetooth radio, SRAM and FLASH memory, as well as various I/O options. The Intel Mote software architecture is based on an ARM port of TinyOS. Networking and routing layers have been created on top of the TinyOS base to provide Bluetooth-based multi-hop functionality. The network is self-organizing on startup and has mechanisms to repair failed links and circumvent failed nodes. A reliable high bandwidth streaming transport layer has also been created. The Intel Mote was deployed in an equipment monitoring application using industrial vibration sensors. This application was chosen since it benefits from the increased platform capabilities and network bandwidth of the Intel Mote platform. The paper presents a detailed analysis of the observed network operation, packet transfer rates, and power consumption.