Invasion of the embedded systems

By Kimberly Patch and Eric Smalley
Network World, 6/8/98

You may thing you'll be able to catch your breath in a couple of years. After all, you're beginning to get a handle on remote access and electronic commerce, and the Year 2000 problem has a built-in deadline.

But lurking on the horizon is a new challenge that will keep you hopping long after the new millennium arrives, potentially adding whole new classes of devices to your network.

The first phase of this insidious plot is almost complete; nearly everything that uses electricity, from light fixtures to copy machines to air conditioners, now incorporates semiconductors. And Phase 2 is underway as increasingly these devices are being connected to corporate networks and the Internet. The invasion of the embedded systems is at hand.

The number of devices that could be attached to a network is impressive: stand-alone office equipment such as photocopiers; input devices such as cameras and microphones; road warrior gear including handheld PCs, cell phones and pagers; transaction-oriented devices, from vending machines to card readers; environmental sensors such as thermostats and pressure gauges; building systems such as lighting monitors and door locks; and consumer electronics devices including toys, set-top boxes and game consoles.

The bottom line is networks are extending their reach ever farther. This poses some obvious problems, including heavier traffic, burgeoning management data and new types of security threats. But the coming world of net-attached devices also harbors opportunities.

Networks are strategic because they facilitate information sharing. The coming boom of net-enabled devices will expand that mission to include real-time information about inventory, resource consumption, maintenance status and human traffic patterns. This information will translate directly into more efficient use of resources and personnel, and facilitate just-in-time processes. The question is, will you be overwhelmed by the burden of integrating all these devices before you can tap this wealth of data?

One of the main benefits motivating companies to integrate devices into their networks is cost recovery, according to John Gage, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Sun Labs in Mountain View, Calif. Every device that consumes or dispenses something, whether it's toner or a soft drink, requires human beings to replenish its supply. Attaching those devices to the network makes it possible to see in real time exactly what device needs resupplying and when. This allows companies to manage costly personnel time more effectively.

"I think the future of networking is the future of efficiencies," Gage says.

The physical plant department at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks has devices that measure temperature, pressure, wind speed, wind direction and carbon monoxide levels all around the campus. The data is transported over the campuswide NetWare network to building management and environmental control applications running on a Windows NT server.

In this fashion, the university's boiler management system, in effect, can communicate with its air-conditioning system, says Randy Bohlman, technology advancement coordinator for the department. Gone are the days when the boiler could kick in on a cool September morning causing the air conditioner to work harder. Likewise, the university now has no problem keeping a specific room cool, such as a data center, while surrounding rooms are comfortably warm.

By integrating its boiler management system with its environmental control system, the university has been able to save 25% of its energy costs, or about $750,000 annually, Bohlman says.

"We crunch numbers [coming from environmental sensors] in different algorithms for energy savings, and then the results of this work go out to the individual controllers," Bohlman says. "We can economically make these interconnects [using the network] where they [would otherwise] cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Users are able to access environmental data from any workstation on campus and can easily pull it into spreadsheets to generate reports. This accounts for significant labor savings, Bohlman adds.

The university achieves additional labor savings because "we're using a lot of neural intelligence within our building management and control network," Bohlman says. The environmental control system "tunes itself. It automatically begins to compensate and correct for alterations in the various systems," he says. For example, the system recalibrates itself when a new sensor comes online.

There is potential for cost savings in network systems as mundane as lighting. The British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver saves 20% to 30% on lighting costs through a combination of sensors that feed a centralized control system, says Gil Moore, physical plant support services manager. Sensors determine how much natural light is in a room, and the control system adjusts the level of electric light accordingly. Similarly, there are sensors that can determine when nobody is in a room, prompting the control system to shut off the lights. The institute also has granular control over the level of light in different rooms so, for example, it can ensure there's always ample light in a conference room. And all this is supported over the school's campus data network.

Teaching devices to talk

Beyond the monitoring and rudimentary control capabilities of SNMP, software technologies are emerging that help enable this communication with various devices. The technologies include Sun's Java variants, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s JetSend and Lucent Technologies, Inc.'s Inferno.

From the Java camp, there's Java Card, which lets developers write applets that run on smart cards. Embedded Java applications run on real-time operating systems on 8- to 32-bit embedded processors. Personal Java is aimed at devices such as handheld PCs and set-top boxes.

HP's JetSend is a communications protocol intended to work over any transport and on any device. It classifies devices ranging from PCs to digital cameras as "senders" and "receivers" and allows them to communicate without knowing the properties of the other device, according to Jim Hammons, HP's Alliance Programs manager.

The software allows two devices - for instance, a digital camera in New York and a photocopier in Los Angeles - to talk to each other over a network, with no computer or additional software required. Similar to the way modems negotiate data rates, JetSend negotiates the best common information format among devices such as fax machines, personal digital assistants (PDA), photocopiers, digital cameras, scanners and smart cards. JetSend is designed for embedded systems, operating in as little as 200K for IP devices and 50K for devices using simpler transports such as infrared, Hammons says.

New York brokerage house Bear, Stearns & Company, Inc. is testing JetSend for use in its IP- and Windows NT-based network, according to an associate director for the company, who asked not to be identified. Bear, Stearns is looking for JetSend to ease the integration of network-attached devices such as scanners and plans to extend use of the technology to PDAs and eventually even photocopiers, he says.

"Using the copier scenario, if I wanted to copy a 30-page document to 10 people in different countries using the Internet or [the] intranet that we have in place, I could do that with JetSend," the associate director says, noting it would be considerably less expensive than faxing the document. Additionally, there's no computer involved in the process, only copiers.

"It's a great technology because it doesn't tie you to the domain model, and it doesn't work under the domain constraints of NT," he says.

Lucent's Inferno is an operating environment encompassing a virtual machine, virtual operating system and virtual network. Inferno functions as an operating system in embedded devices, taking up as little as 1M byte of space. It also functions as an application on top of Windows 95, NT and various flavors of Unix.

Inferno uses a platform- and transport-independent file system in which everything, including devices, looks like files, according to Ron DeLange, vice president of Lucent's Inferno network development group. As a result, he says, Inferno can treat entire classes of devices as single entities, easing software upgrades, for example.

Fuzzy logic controllers, used in many consumer electronics products, are also poised to ease the integration of simple devices such as sensors. Fuzzy logic controllers could reduce the amount of raw data sent over the network because they can be set to evaluate multiple criteria, says Bruce Watson, marketing manager of National Semiconductor Corp.'s LAN division in Atlanta. For example, an outdoor heat sensor could avoid triggering an alarm even though a threshold has been passed because it recognizes that it's 2 p.m. and it's July, he says.

Infrastructure challenges

Before deploying any of these technologies, you need to ensure your network infrastructure is up to the integration task.

Bandwidth is an obvious concern. Though adding a multitude of devices to the net will increase network traffic, the size of the increase is not so obvious. After all, not every light fixture and heat sensor will need to be a full-fledged IP node. And few devices are likely to generate as much traffic as a typical end user. Some devices will send a steady stream of audio or video data, but most will likely send only occasional status reports that could be as simple as "It's dark" or "It's cold."

Where network managers will likely feel the most pain from integrating network-attached devices - and where corporations will likely reap the most benefits - is in processing the data itself.

Adding more devices to your network will increase the need for higher level enterprise management systems such as Computer Associates International, Inc.'s Unicenter TNG Framework and Tivoli Systems, Inc.'s Tivoli Management Environment, according to Stephen Foote, vice president of research strategy for Hurwitz Consulting in Framingham, Mass.

"Think of it as wounded soldiers coming in off the battlefield," he says. "You've got so many of them, you have no idea which ones need attention first. [Network managers] can't be expected to fully understand the behavior of all these different types of devices, so you need some form of heuristics to tell you when things are going wrong."

For many users, however, the heterogeneous network management systems they already have will be up to the task, according to Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, a market research firm in Norberth, Pa.

"It's more of the same," she says, noting only new management applications will be required.

And not all the management traffic generated by network-attached devices will be of concern to network managers. Fortunately, they will be able to use emerging technologies to alleviate some of their burden.

For example, instead of using an SNMP trap to have a copier issue an alert about its status, a net manager could configure JetSend to e-mail or page someone, the Bear, Stearns associate director says. Many of the new devices will also be easier to work with because they will be able to configure themselves when they're added to the network.

"More devices, but more intelligent devices," he says. "That's the difference."

Added risks

In the era of network attached-devices, security, as always, is an issue.

With the absence of adequate security measures, hackers would be able to disrupt power, turn off or change environmental controls, trigger false fire alarms and disable smoke detectors. The illicit task of crashing a company's computers becomes easier when all a hacker has to do is turn off the air conditioning in the computer room. Hackers or competitors could also glean information from device-generated data sent over the Internet to outsourcers and suppliers.

"Network managers have to . . . improve the way in which they manage these devices over and above the default SNMP, because SNMP is downright miserable when it comes to security," Foote says.

He recommends a four-step approach to security:

Compartmentalize the network with internal firewalls between business areas, departments or geographic areas.
Audit for use of modems on the network to locate back doors.
Establish an intrusion detection scheme by monitoring network traffic.
Authenticate management access to devices.

More bandwidth, and crank the AC

If everything that runs on electricity is potentially a network device, many companies will need to reconsider how they are organized. As buildings become intelligent, the distinctions between the information and physical infrastructures blur.

"The network manager is going to be monitoring . . . all of these things which now seem to be somebody else's purview," Sun Labs' Gage says. "The first thing [businesses] need to do is break down the barriers in the company that separate the computer networking people from the facilities management people."

However, it's important to keep clear the distinction between automating a process and assigning responsibility for the process.

"I don't think IT wants to be responsible for everything," says Heather Ashton, Internet business strategies analyst for Hurwitz Consulting. "[The boom of net devices] has the potential for being a nightmare for IT."

The best approach to integrating facilities management, at least in the short run, is for IT to treat the facilities department as a "customer" of the network, just like any other department. The facilities department uses the corporate data network to access devices, while the network manager accounts for the added traffic in load balancing and planning. This approach will also put the net manager in position to adapt to the continuing evolution of networks. Beyond expanding the reach of networks, the coming wave of net-attached devices will change the very nature of corporate networks. Intranets are helping to flatten organizations, and extranets, in a sense, are turning companies inside out. Next, net-attached devices will start to dissolve the boundaries of corporate networks altogether, Gage says.

"My bet is network managers never think that every vehicle driven by every employee of their company is part of their network," he says. "But it is, and so is every home."