A Gateway-Based Approach for Information Retrieval from Data-Centric Wireless Sensor Networks from IP Hosts

Abstract

With applications ranging from environmental and health monitoring to military surveillance and inventory tracking, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are changing the way we collect and use data and will be a major part of our technological future. The decreased manufacturing cost of these small devices has made it reasonable to deploy many sensor nodes -- 10s to 1000s and more -- over large and small indoor and outdoor areas for sensing tasks. With this increase in density come data-gathering problems. It would be useful if an IP-based host could collect information from multiple remote data-centric networks using a predefined application programming interface (API). This thesis presents two APIs, one API for wireless sensor nodes in a data-centric Directed Diffusion WSN and the other API for IP-based nodes residing on an IP network outside of the WSN. An associated WSN middleware layer used to effectively connect these two APIs is also presented. These three components work together in harmony to enable IP-based hosts to gather sensed data from one or more remote WSNs through an application-layer gateway which links these different remote WSNs to an IP network.