Since wireless networking always seems to emphasize faster and farther, it's oddly refreshing to consider radios that are, for lack of a better description, slow and short. RFID comes to mind, but the cost of RFID tags needs to shrink a lot before we'll see a huge increase in market size for this end of the wireless world.

On the other hand, telemetry and control applications have been able to take advantage of slow and short for some time. Water rising in a tank and voltage monitoring seldom demand high-speed connections or even an Internet Protocol address.

While data rates aren't the gating item here, range often is, so the "short" part of slow and short gets in the way. Wire is thus still the norm. But we are now seeing the beginning of a simple and elegant solution based on mesh-networking techniques. Your radio can't go too far? All you need is to get to the next node and let the routing protocols of the mesh take it from there. While the technologies are similar, we need to draw a distinction with metro-scale meshes, which increasingly use Wi-Fi for both client access and backhaul. Rather, we've taken to calling these sensor-based meshes micromeshes, even though one could easily conceive of a micromesh covering a huge geography with thousands or even millions of nodes.

The beauty of meshes is in their resilience. Multiple simultaneous paths can exist in a mesh, allowing adaptive traffic management and dynamic routing to work around errors in RF propagation and the inevitable dead battery. Power management is one of the biggest challenges facing micromeshes that involve mobility. But I've seen designs that could potentially have years of battery life, again given the short ranges and low data rates that these nets are designed to handle. With declining prices, the range of applications is enormous — from telemetry and control to security and even consumer products.

Unlike most other radio-based solutions, micromeshes will only succeed when they disappear, and are taken for granted because they just plain work. There's a lot that needs to be done between now and then, however, particularly in application design and development, and in micromesh monitoring, management and control. But there are no technological showstoppers here; expect micromeshes to become a large piece of the wireless market.

Craig J. Mathias is principal of Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.).