This is Issue II of the report, which was necessary to update previous information and to present new marketing data on WSN-UGS.

The topic of this report is Unattended Ground Sensors communications technologies and markets. UGSs are becoming common tools to obtain various information, including environmental, situational and other data from difficult reachable for humans places. They, initially, were utilized in the various military applications, and only lately found the place in the commercial sectors, starting from SCADA and going even to Personal Body LAN. The main advantage of such sensors is their ability to utilizing wireless communications between the area of deployment and an operator who may be located miles from the area of UGS operations.

Large-scale WSN-UGS represent an evolving generation of embedded communications structures and they have characteristics that differentiate them from traditional wireless networks. WSN-UGS have many constrains that are not typical for other wireless networks, such as:

• Node size
• Dependence on the battery life
• Bandwidth
• Extreme conditions for operations
• Large number of nodes.

These networks are usually constructed in a mesh topology, and are left to be self-organized and self-protected. They can function unattended for months, collecting valuable commercial or military information necessary for their users functioning. In many cases, these networks availability is vital for success of the military operation or normal operation of a manufacturing facility.

Our analysis showed that the UGS addressable market is growing together with a military WSN-UGS market, and 2010-2012 years will be a time of UGS penetration in a variety of commercial and military sectors.

The report concentrates on two forward-looking technologies, UWB and ZigBee that were designed with such applications as UGS in mind. Though completely different in nature, these technologies are well suited for UGS communications specifics, such as extremely low power consumption, low levels of transmission with noise-like signals, high security and low-to middle speeds of transmission.

The report contains marketing and technical analysis of both UWB and ZigBee, with accent on their applicability to support WSN-UGS mesh infrastructures. It also provides the analysis of UGS specifics in the WSN environment.