Wireless Sensor Networking in 2000: The Arena Project
Written by Adam Dunkels,
Saturday, 06 September 2008
After the release of Contiki 2.2.1, we take a look at the history of Contiki. The origins of Contiki can be traced to a project I was involved in 2000: The Arena Project, a cooperation between Ericsson, Telia, and Luleå University of Technology. The Arena Project equipped the ice hockey players in Luleå Hockey (famous for Mikael Renberg and others) with wireless sensors that sent pulse and breath rate data to the audience, and an on-helmet camera with wireless access. I developed the IP stack that we ran on the wireless sensors: the lightweight lwIP stack, subsequently used in thousands of embedded devices all over the world.
A promotional video created for the Arena project was recently uploaded to youtube: see it here and read on for details.
The wireless sensors on the ice hockey players were equipped with an M16C CPU with 20 kilobytes of RAM and 100 kilobytes of flash ROM, and a Bluetooth module. In the year of 2000, Bluetooth was the newest and hottest wireless technology, and Ericsson was seriously pushing it.
Sensor data was transmitted with IP over an ad hoc Bluetooth connection. We used only the physical layer of the Bluetooth stack, and built our own networking layer on top of it. Sensor data was transmitted over UDP to the audience, and each sensor also had a web server with which we configured the device. The on-helmet camera was implemented with 802.11.
The system was tested for real in a game between Luleå Hockey and Brynäs Hockey. The technology worked, but the players did not like to have a breathing rate sensor in their noses, and Luleå Hockey lost the game with 1-4.
The hockey player monitoring system was only a prototype, but the lwIP project still lives on, is widely used in the embedded industry, and version 1.3.0 was released in March this year.
Three years after the Arena project was concluded, Contiki and the uIP stack brought IP to wireless sensor networks, but this time the radio technology is 802.15.4 and the power consumption is much lower.
