You have two options – wired or wireless sensing networks. When we’re talking about environmental monitoring, increasingly we’re wanting to see wireless sensing networks, and there’s a variety of ways that people are implementing that. Our friends at Steam with the Waterford Institute of Technology are using a technology called SmartMesh for a wireless mesh networking technology. That’s really intended for high reliability and shorter range communications, so that’s great for a localized area. When you’re looking for medium distances, you might looking at something like LoRaWAN type of network as just an example of one of the solutions that’s becoming popular in the IoT space. If you need really long range, we’ve been looking at cellular or even satellite connectivity. There is some additional costs associated with that. So there are some tradeoffs, but there’s more options becoming available for wireless networking technology, and that’s really going to be the backbone of distributed sensing networks.
