Millennial Net, Inc. is a leading worldwide provider of commercial and industrial wireless networking systems and products for the energy management and automation markets. Founded in 2000 by two MIT researchers, Millennial began as a pioneer and innovator in wireless sensor network technologies. Today, Millennial Net is rapidly driving the technology into products, OEM applications, and enterprise solutions, focusing primarily on commercial and industrial markets.
Millennial Net has established strong customer bases in the energy management and industrial automation industries. It’s technologies have applications beyond these key vertical markets, such as medical monitoring, agricultural monitoring, and homeland security and defense.
Millennial Net, Inc. is a privately held company, headquartered in Chelmsford, MA.
Dieter Schill - President and CEO
As the company’s president and chief executive officer, Dieter Schill is responsible for the strategic direction of Millennial Net. He manages overall business operations by providing direction and leadership toward the achievement of our corporate philosophy, mission, and strategy. He has over two decades of executive-level business management experience. Prior to Millennial Net, Dieter served as Founder, President and CEO of DMG Canada, Inc. from 2000 to 2007. He developed DMG Canada to become one of the largest machine tool companies in Canada. He was Regional Sales Director – Americas, for Festo Germany, where he managed a $200 million sales operation. Earlier he served as Festo’s General Manager in South Africa, and in other management positions in Canada and Germany. Dieter holds a Master’s degree in International Business from the University of South Carolina, as well as a Master’s degree in Business and Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.
Sokwoo Rhee, Ph.D. - Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Sokwoo Rhee brings to Millennial Net unique interdisciplinary expertise in wireless communication and industrial and biomedical instrumentation. Before he joined Millennial Net, he was a research associate at MIT focusing on wireless biomedical instrumentation. At Millennial Net he developed the breakthrough design for ultra-low-power wireless instrumentation circuitry and the power-efficient ad-hoc networking protocol which make up the core of Millennial Net's miniature wireless sensor networking devices. During his career at MIT, he designed and implemented several innovative biomedical sensors for wireless physiological monitoring, including an ambulatory health monitoring device called the Ring Sensor. He also designed and implemented several novel electromechanical systems and time-critical embedded software environments, including a Windows NT-based, real-time operating extension. As Chief Technology Officer, he drives the research and development strategy for Millennial Net. Sokwoo holds an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sheng Liu, Ph.D. - Co-founder and Vice President of Technical Services
With more than 15 years of research and project management experience, Sheng Liu brings solid technical competence and valuable R&D management skills to Millennial Net. Prior to Millennial Net, Sheng was a Senior Development Engineer at Raytheon Electronic's Systems Design Laboratory, where he played a critical role in designing receiver spread-spectrum decoding algorithms for differential-GPS based aircraft precision approach and landing systems. Before Raytheon, Sheng spent more than five years as a research scientist at MIT, directing industry-sponsored research programs in the areas of controls, robotics, simulations, signal processing and mechatronics. Sheng received a B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, an M.S. degree from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. degree from MIT.
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.