Raffi Krikorian holds up a circuit board no bigger than a matchbook, with just enough space for a couple of chips, a few threads of wiring and a socket or two. “It costs maybe three dollars,” he tells me.
It’s so cheap and simple, Krikorian’s team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new Center for Bits and Atoms expect their humble circuit not only to change the way we wire our homes, but transform how we live in them too.
The researchers plan to insert their device into everything from lights, switches and temperature sensors to door locks and shelves. They will then be hooked up to form a network that replaces the usual jumble of cables, switches and other gear you need to wire up and automate a building.
Is this just another over-hyped brick in the wall of the smart home? Certainly not, says Neil Gershenfeld, director of the new MIT centre and head of the project. He and his team are using their tiny circuit board to turn almost everything in a home into a Web server. Give each a unique Web address and these objects can then talk to each other using a simplified form of the standard communications language of the Internet. The result is a single, open-source, simple standard that Gershenfeld has named Internet “zero”.
He claims that the benefit Internet 0 brings will be far greater than the sum of its parts. You get all the advantages of a global Internet - simplicity, reliability and infinite flexibility - yet without the need for computers to control it. “Our idea isn’t to put computers in a building,” says Gershenfeld, “but in a very literal sense to let the building be the computer.”
Extend Internet-like connectivity to even the most rudimentary components of a building and you slash the costs of networking it. You can rearrange and reconnect Internet 0 at will - and you don’t need to know a hub from a handshake to do it. You can link lights, movement sensors, heaters and air conditioning, for example, so the system can tell when rooms are in use and adjust the temperature and lighting accordingly. In case of fire, the network can tell rescuers how many people are in a building and where they are. It can give you remote control of washing machines, cookers, curtains or video players from inside or outside the home. It can bring health monitoring to every room, even reminding you to take you medication if you forget. No matter how and where you want to interact with your space, Internet 0 can help.
If it is to catch on, Internet 0 will certainly need to be something special: thre are already plenty of ways to raise the electronic IQ of your home. Take X10, created by a company in Kent, Washington, that also uses electricity cables to form the network. To automate an air conditioning unit, for example, you connect it to an X10 module, then plug the module into an electric socket. Plug a transceiver module into an electric socket elsewhere in the building and it can be used to turn the air conditioning on or off. Wireless technology such as Bluetooth simplifies things by enabling computers, phones and other devices to communicate by radio. In larger buildings, these networks need to be sophisticate, so systems such as Echelon Corporation’s LonWorks use transceivers, control modules and specialist software to manage appliances like boilers and air conditioners.
What gives Internet 0 the edge? The major problem with most of its competitors is that they don’t scale up or down, says Gershenfeld. If you want to use LonWorks simply to turn a light on or off, you have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment and software capable of handling air-conditioning systems. Meanwhile, systems designed for smaller networks such as X10 run into problems when you try to scale them up. Bandwidth restrictions on electricity cables, for example, mean you can use no more than 255 modules per network. Internet 0 is a reaction against these inefficiencies, says Gershenfeld. “It has learned from their mistakes and is a more mature successor to them. In fact, it could eliminate them.”
Two breakthroughs have enabled the researchers to swap the usual building full of specialised hardware for simple Net circuit boards. The first involved stripping down the Net’s communications system to its bare bones. The second simply slowed the speed at which data travels through the network.
Using a slimmed-down version of the Internet’s own communications system was the real leap. “The Internet has been around for 30 years and already has worked out a lot of its early problems and mistakes,” says Krikorian. It relies on an open protocol that everyone in the world uses. “We realised that we could take advantage of that.”
However, turning something as small as a wall plug into a Web server called for a tricky feat of software engineering called “de-layering”. The Internet’s communications system is built up of seven “layers”. The first or physical layer defines the electrical and mechanical specifications for the network’s hardware; the second defines how a computer accesses the network; the seventh provides the interface between software applications such as a Web browser and the network.
According to Gershenfeld, these layers are the software embodiment of human bureaucracy: each one has a sort of management committee to administer it and much of its code exists simply to pass messages on to the next layer. The only way to make this system small enough to fit onto a tiny chip was to strip away redundant or non-essential features from each layer, leaving only the code absolutely necessary to perform a specific task. If you were to fully implement each layer, you might need a megabyte of code. But Krikorian found enough waste and duplication for him to fit the essential functions of all seven layers on a 4-kilobyte memory chip. “Our chip doesn’t have an operating system,” he says. “It doesn’t need to communicate with printers or detemine which version of software some other computer is running.” All it needs to do is send and receive simple commands that resemble Web addresses.
In addition to de-layering, turning a building into a hive of Internet sites means drastically slowing the speed at which data flows through the wires. At any junctions in a network, a data bit will create a small electronic reflection. This reflection can interfere with the data and garble the message. Conventional networks such as Ethernet use expensive pieces of hardware called “hubs” to eliminate reflections at corners and junctions. But simply sending the data through more slowly reduces the interference caused by reflections, so in Internet 0, the bit rate is slowed to less than a megabyte of data per second. “That means that we can now build a network the way an electrician wires a room,” says Gershenfeld. “Instead of putting in hubs and special equipment, we can just splice wires together.”
And Internet 0 doesn’t need a central computer to assign an Internet address to each electrical connection. When a device such as a light switch is turned on, its chip picks and address at random and checks that the address hasn’t already been assigned. If not, it will use it permanently. Add a computer to the system or link it to the global Internet so you can control appliances from anywhere in the world, and it will still work.
Krikorian is also working on systems that communicate using high or low-frequency wireless signals. “If you need servers in your basement, a network installer to set up your system and a programmer to debug it, you’re doomed,” says Gershenfeld. “The network infrastructure has to act just like a building: you put the stuff together and it works.”
Networks based on Internet protocols are the future of smart buildings, agrees Ken Sinclair, a building automation consultant and editor of automatedbuildings.com. Internet 0 could turn out to be a powerful system, he says. But he believes that if the project is to succeed, it will inevitably grow beyond the simple design that the MIT group envisions. Take something as simple as transmitting a temperature setting to a control device, he says. How many decimal places and how many bits of data will you use? Will it be Fahrenheit, Celsius or just a raw electrical resistance?
“They seem to think that all they need to do is give something an IP address. It’s more complicated than that. You need to have a lot of rules in the system and pretty soon their $3 de-layered chip turns into a $10 or $20 chip.”
Since Internet 0 can interface with the Internet outside, concerns about security also loom large. You don’t want hackers to turn off your alarm system in the middle of the night, says Doug Johnson, manager of standards strategy for Sun Microsystems. “In my judgement, Internet 0 won’t fully address this issue for some time.” Gershenfeld and Krikorian will have to include some interim solutions until there’s a better understanding of exactly what forms of security are needed, he suggests.
Gershenfeld has most of the answers. There are various firewalls and encryption techniques that can protect you from hackers, he says. But he admits that at the moment there are limits to the amount of information that Internet 0 can handle. It’s simple to encode something like a temperature-setting in a message, he says, but the system wouldn’t have the capacity to send documents between PCs, for example. Ultimately, he argues, the limits of Internet 0’s capabilities will be determined by the community that uses it..
If the people who automate buildings still have their doubts about Internet 0, the people who built them don’t. “When we started this work, we found that the construction industry was passionate about,” says Gershenfeld.
Because the network combines the supply of power with networking, it could change the way that buildings are constructed. As much as 80 percent of the cost of erecting a building is labour. Rather than having to hard-wire switches to particular sockets, it means that the entire building can be made programmable. That could often save the time and cost of hiring electricians whenever you want to swap light switches, for example, or hiring network specialists to install hubs and other dedicated network paraphernalia.
“Builders love this,” says Krikorian. Say a builder puts up an office block wired with Internet 0 components. A buyer looks over a unit and says “I’ll take it, but I want this wall taken out.” With Internet 0, the builder won’t always have to hire an electrician to rewire the entire place. He can just push a few buttons and re-route lights and sockets automatically. The potential economic impact is enormous. There should be savings in heating bills too. For example, the air supplied to a room can be adjusted locally, based not just on a thermostat setting but on data from motion sensors indicating the number of people in the room, from switches showing whether the windows are open and from the outside air temperature. The room’s air-conditioning unit can receive information directly from those devices and act appropriately.
Internet 0 will obviously be adopted by large commercial buildings first. And its first test should come soon, at MIT itself. The team hopes to have battle-hardened devices ready for production in time to try them out in the Media Lab’s new building, which is already under construction.
This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in the February 15, 2003 issue of ‘NewScientist’.