Before you can come to grips with industrial real-time location systems, you must understand the environment in which they function and the communications that empower them.

The next generation of networks will move beyond disconnected device-specific networks and systems and toward a distributed infrastructure, with intelligent functions residing across the entire network, from its edge to its core.

With the variety of wireless technologies available, outfitting an industrial or commercial environment for wireless communications may involve mixing and matching technologies to find the optimal solution. Here are the issues to consider to make your mix a successful one.

A new approach to wireless sensor networking adds local intelligence to the nodes, creating pervasive computers and enabling sensor networks that can both acquire data and initiate action without human intervention.

Integrating networks of sensors has been a goal for years, from the creation of device profiles and industrial networking standards through to the adoption of ad hoc wireless sensor and control networks. Web services promise to ease the integration of these disparate and distributed elements.

If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning.

The Today at Sensors weblog (www.sensorsmag.com) not only gave us Sensors editors an outlet to report daily from Sensors Expo (June 5–7, www.sensorsexpo.com), but also it lets us tell you more about Expo happenings—among other things—than we've been able to before. Thank goodness, because there's much to tell!

What is the difference between the licensed and unlicensed bands and why should I care?

Municipalities typically generate a large amount of compostable material as a byproduct of their wastewater treatment operations. The "green" cities turn this unappealing substance into something of benefit to everyone, but the transformation doesn't happen all on its own.

According to Forecast International analyst Larry Dickerson, the market for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance systems, including air vehicles and payloads, is expected to be worth $13.6 billion through 2014. "Thanks to their battlefield successes in Iraq and Afghanistan, money is being lavished on UAV programs as never before," said Dickerson.