The unique characteristics of the Newtrax networking technology make it the single solution to certain types of applications. This is particularly true where the networked devices are battery/solar powered, inherently nomadic in nature and live in an electromagnetically hostile environment such as underground mines, railway hub yards, urban environments, battlefields or heavy industrial sites.

Advantages of Newtrax wireless mesh technology

Typical wireless sensors network protocols do not provide a solid foundation for scalable, robust and reliable low energy mesh networks. Newtrax wireless mesh technology outperforms them on:

Energy consumption	Newtrax TDMA enables two nodes to communicate without disturbing neighbors. Typical WSN CSMA forces all nodes in range to listen to a preamble, which adds significant burden: the preamble used to communicate with time synchronized and asynchronized nodes lasts 40ms and 125ms respectively. This is a major problem in dense clusters and/or when nodes with low duty cycle and high power transmissions are used to reduce the number of hops to destination; Typical WSN gateways are not low energy, they must be line/grid powered. Therefore, typical WSN cannot be used in field applications with battery powered satellite/cellular sinks to the Internet;
Resiliency	Newtrax networks are based on FHSS, so throughput decreases gracefully in the presence of interferers or multipath nulls; Newtrax networks form using distributed synchronization and resource allocation. They therefore quickly adapt to new node arrival, departure or arbitrary failure. If a sink fails, packets are routed to any alternate/redundant sink without network downtime. In typical WSN, the gateway is a centralized network coordinator and single point of failure; In typical WSN centrally dictated synchronization architectures, all nodes downstream from a broken link lose synchronization and are forced back into network discovery and self-organizing mode;
Scalability	Maximum node capacity is lower in typical WSN, which use a single frequency channel, than in Newtrax networks, which use multiple channels with statistically independent frequency hopping patterns; In typical WSN, total throughput decreases as the number of nodes and/or traffic increases, because collisions increase in CSMA contention based channels; Typical WSN have a practical limit of < 200 descendants per gateway. This constraint complicates installation, prevents seamless network extensions and restricts fallback redundancy. Newtrax distributed architecture has no such limit. For instance, 10,000 Newtrax nodes can use a single sink for reporting to the central server by exception; Newtrax networks can seamlessly route packets through multiple sinks. Outbound/Inbound throughput gracefully adapts to the number of sinks available; Newtrax distributed architecture enables cost effective small networks, because there is no need to amortize the cost of a network coordinator/gateway. Any node, via its RS-232/SPI port can be used to connect the ad hoc network to a sink device;

Newtrax wireless mesh technology compared with standard wireless local area network technologies

		Zigbee^TM	Wi-Fi^TM	Bluetooth^TM
Target application	Low data rate machine-to-machine communications	Low data rate machine-to-machine communications	High-speed digital video, voice and data	Isochronous peripheral WPAN
Native topology	100% mesh and battery powered	Line/grid powered mesh backbone with battery powered star leaf nodes	Line/grid powered mesh backbone with battery powered star leaf nodes	Battery powered star
Self-organizing and self-healing	Ad hoc	Central network coordinator	Central network coordinator	Ad hoc
Battery life of leaf nodes	Years	Years	Hours	Days
Battery life of mesh routers	Years	Hours
Battery life of gateway or access point	Years	Hours
Link data rate	38.4 / 250 kbps	40.0 / 250 kbps
End-to-end latency	Seconds	Sub-second
Reliability and stability in harsh environment	High	Low

Newtrax wireless mesh technology compared with typical wireless sensor networks

		Typical wireless sensor networks
Multiple access scheme	TDMA	CSMA
Synchronization for communications	Per link, ad hoc, distributed	None or centrally dictated by gateway
Frequency hopping	Yes	No
Hopping speed	Fast (one hop per timeslot)	-
Hopping pattern	Statistically independent	-
Self-organizing and self-healing	Ad hoc	Coordinated by gateway
Routing capability	Any-to-any, multihop full mesh, unicast, broadcast with time-to-live, to nearest gateway	Immediate neighbor and to/from gateway
Maximum number of nodes per gateway	Unrestricted	< 200 recommended because performance degrades exponentially with size
Maximum number of gateways per network	Unrestricted	1
Impact of packet transmission on neighbors	Target node listens in predefined frequency and time slot	All nodes in range listen to preamble
Impact of routing capability on latency and scalability	Full mesh: minimizes hops to destination and distributes traffic	To/from gateway: requires many more hops and leads to congestion about gateway

Comparison of popular RF IC options

Frequency band	902-928 MHz		2400-2483.5 Mhz
PHY radio	Narrowband	IEEE 802.15.4	Narrowband	IEEE 802.15.4
TX power	+15 dBm	+12 dBm	+1 dBm	0 dBm
TX power with PA (Max)	+30 dBm	+30 dBm	+30 dBm	+30 dBm
RX sensitivity	-108 dBm	-98 dBm	-89 dBm	-95 dBm
RX sensitivity with LNA	n/a	n/a	-98 dBm	-98 dBm
Data rate	38.4 kbps	40.0 kbps	250 kbps	250 kbps
Channel bandwidth	200 kHz	600 kHz	550 kHz	2 MHz
Number of channels	64	10	95	16
Channel spacing	400 kHz	2 MHz	875 kHz	5 MHz
Adjacent channel rejection	48 dB	0 dB	25 dB	39 dB
Alternate channel rejection	48 dB	30 dB	35 dB	55 dB
Maximum total system throughput in airspace	2.5 Mbps	0.4 mbps	23.8 Mbps	4.0 Mbps