Fujitsu Components selects Wirepas Mesh for advanced IoT solution development

Fujitsu Component Limited (Head office: Tokyo, Japan, President Hiroaki Kondo) today announced it has selected Wirepas Mesh software technology to integrate into their latest hardware. This will enable Fujitsu Components to develop complete solutions with secure, decentralized and scalable mesh networking features and tunable ultra-low-power, high throughput and low latency modes tailored for healthcare, industrial automation, smart building and many more markets.

There are three major network topologies to establish wireless connectivity: point-to-point topology, star topology, and mesh topology which allows multiple hops (Fig-1).

Fig-1 Network topologies

Fujitsu Components chose Wirepas Mesh because of its advantages over conventional mesh network technologies, including:

1. Ability to construct a large scale, high-density network
2. Lower power consumption on each device
3. Autonomous network rerouting if the network environment (surrounding noise, node counts, interference) changes or device failure occurs (Fig-2)
4. Excellent radio wave interference resistance

Fig-2 Autonomous network rerouting

The technology utilizes the 2.4GHz frequency band, but adopts a unique protocol which is different from that of Wireless LAN or Bluetooth® technology. As a leading company in wireless modules, beacons and sensor devices, Fujitsu Components has added several complementary technologies to simplify data collection over various wireless technologies from sensor fitted beacons, making IoT connectivity a simple to integrate exercise.

Co-creation is the key according to Fujitsu Components, a specialist in the development and manufacturing of wireless products. Through years of experience in solving radio technology hurdles and complex design issues, Fujitsu Components sets the bar as solution provider. Together with its partners, Fujitsu Components offers IoT Connectivity Solutions for a wide variety of applications. The goal is to make IoT connectivity a simple to integrate exercise that is fully achievable when using Fujitsu Components IoT Connectivity Solutions.

Applications

Lighting

Light is an important factor in human well-being and productivity. However, the implementation of lighting systems in the near future will require an intuitive approach towards responsible energy consumption. The IoT will be of great influence in future developments requiring lighting systems to be connected in a controllable and scalable system. With the main power system already providing the perfect infrastructure, it enables an easy to build and all containing network offering even more than just light control.

Fujitsu Components IoT Connectivity Solutions powered by Wirepas Mesh creates a connected, intelligent lighting system that combines low-latency operation for light control as well as a high data rate network to capture data from various sensors. These sensors are able to capture key data about their surroundings, such as occupancy, motion and air quality. The sensors can be battery powered and last for years within this network due to the ultra-low power mode of the connected devices.

Asset Management

Fujitsu Components IoT Connectivity Solutions powered by Wirepas Mesh make it possible to collect data in any environment and for any need. Time-stamped inventory levels, location and various types of sensor data, such as humidity, temperature or acceleration, can be required for Asset Management. Data retrieval and bi-directional communication with assets (order picking) opens up possibilities such as management of large scale assets in warehouse environments, offices, manufacturing lines, hospitals, oil, gas and mining, construction sites, etc. When using Fujitsu Components IoT Connectivity Solutions powered by Wirepas Mesh, location data collection is fully automated and locations can be pinpointed and tracked through the use of the Wirepas positioning engine.

Sensors

Fujitsu IoT Connectivity Solutions supports reliable data collection from unlimited numbers of sensor nodes in a single global mesh network. Due to the low-powered nature of the solution, every connected device can be battery operated while large scale deployment is fast and easy due to the mesh network topology powered by Wirepas Mesh.

Fujitsu places emphasis on solutions that cover the requirements of various markets with one easy-to-implement solution, instead of multiple difficult-to-connect solutions.

Hardware Schedule

Initially Fujitsu Components is offering Wirepas enabled hardware as building blocks for mesh network solutions.
Samples for test and demo purposes are available in July 2018. Mass production and a Wirepas-enabled gateway will be announced soon.

Left: Mesh Node/Mesh Sensor Node, Right: Mesh Module