Millennial Net, Inc. is a leading worldwide provider of commercial, industrial and government wireless energy management and sensor network systems. Founded in 2000 by two MIT researchers, Millennial Net began as a pioneer and innovator in wireless sensor network technologies. Today, Millennial Net is rapidly driving the technology into products and enterprise solutions for wireless energy management with its digital pneumatic thermostats and dynamic OEM applications using its Meshscape wireless sensor network technology.
Millennial Net has established strong customer bases in the energy management and industrial automation industries. Its technologies have applications beyond these key vertical markets, such as medical monitoring, agricultural monitoring, and homeland security and defense. View our energy management solution applications and our wireless sensor network solution applications.
Millennial Net, Inc. is a privately held company, headquartered in Chelmsford, MA.
In order to realize benefits wireless sensor networking promises, the technology must be able to address several critical requirements: reliability of data transmission, responsiveness to adapt to dynamic environments, power efficiency, and scalability. The MeshScape™ wireless sensor networking software platform from Millennial Net delivers on all of these requirements. MeshScape’s ready-to-embed hardware modules support fast and cost-effective application development.
Millennial Net has developed and optimized its technology to address the unique characteristics and challenges associated with wireless sensor networking. The end result is a networking system and associated protocol that is highly scalable, ultra-efficient, and extremely responsive and resilient in dynamic environments. The Millennial Net protocol for wireless sensor networks provides the industry’s longest battery life at sensor nodes, while delivering data over fault-tolerant links with end-to-end redundancy.
The Millennial Net protocol uses D3R - a set of patented techniques for reliable and scalable wireless sensor networks—which has been designed specifically to meet all critical challenges of wireless sensor networks. When forming an ad hoc sensor network, Persistent Dynamic Routing requires minimal overhead for requesting and establishing connectivity without relying on the bandwidth-consuming flooding technique.
- Highly responsive - Unlike other protocols that require route discovery for the entire network to react to changes in the network’s topology, MeshScape performs discovery at a local level. This reduces the number of discovery packets generated, especially for large and/or dense networks, and minimizes network latency due to self-healing. It also results in much higher responsiveness compared to other protocols in the highly dynamic environments.
- Reliable - MeshScape guarantees packet delivery from sensor to end node to the gateway by using hop-by-hop packet acknowledgement. In dynamic RF environments, if a primary route path is impaired, the network will automatically revert to a secondary route path. Unlike other protocols that drop a data packet when it can’t be delivered and simply send back an error message, MeshScape rolls back both the data packet and responsibility for transmitting it through the network until an alternative route is found.
- Extremely power efficient - The MeshScape system offers a power-efficient solution allowing all nodes to be battery powered, enabling networks to run on coin cell batteries for years. The MeshScape protocol generates minimal packet overhead for high power efficiency. End nodes and mesh nodes are optimized to be actively listening or transmitting for minimal time periods to conserve power. While most solutions enable end nodes to sleep for power conservation, MeshScape supports sleep mode for mesh nodes for complete, network-wide power optimization.
- Scalable - In wireless sensor networking, the network’s ability to scale to a large number of nodes is dependent on its ability to minimize packets needed to create and maintain route path information. In a completely static environment, other protocols may scale relatively well, In the real world, however, increased environmental dynamics generate more overhead affecting the actual scalability of the network. The efficient MeshScape protocol generates minimal route path packet overhead for maximum scalability.