Jennic enhances wireless sensor network management and control with the release of JenNet 1v4

New features in the release include the ability to perform dynamic load balancing to avoid data bottlenecks within the network and automatic collation and reporting of network statistics such as link quality, packet retries and lost packets to enable improved network management. Automatic network re-shaping has also been added to minimise the number of data path hops between nodes in a network, ensuring compact network configuration and minimal data latency to improve performance in applications such as alarm monitoring systems.

The release supports node mobility, which enables asset tracking and RFID (radio frequency identification) applications, and fast startup capabilities that allow a 250-node network to fully recover in 5 minutes following a complete power outage, minimising network downtime.

Jennic’s CEO, Jim Lindop, explained, “Customers of our existing JenNet product tell us they love the ease and speed with which they are able to integrate wireless connectivity into their products. The new features in JenNet 1v4 further enhance ease of use, and also demonstrate the maturity o requirements that exists for real world wireless networking applications. JenNet 1v4 sees the advent of functionality that should add significant value to many end user applications.”

The highly optimised JenNet 1v4 stack typically requires only 52K Kbytes for coordinator/router functions and 38Kbytes for end devices in the JN5139 wireless microcontroller, thus leaving ample code space for most applications.

JenNet is Jennic’s free proprietary wireless networking stack for its range of single chip 32-bit wireless microcontrollers, with a distinct focus on ease of use through a series of simple application programming interfaces called Jenie and AT-Jenie. JenNet offers a robust and field-proven networking solution for applications requiring many hundreds of nodes connected in star, cluster tree or long-thin network configurations.