A Foundation for Interoperable Sensor Networks with Internet Bridging
Alan Marchiori, Qi Han · 2008
Current sensor networks tend to have a solitary focus where the entire sensor network is dedicated to solving a single problem. We believe this approach suppresses the wide-spread acceptance of sensor networks because each network needs to be individually designed and configured. This is in contrast to the Internet, where numerous systems of vastly different design successfully share the network medium without the need for custom configuration. In this paper we present a simple framework that provides basic network services for resourceconstrained nodes. This framework has interfaces similar to Internet style protocols. This ensures that (1) different sensor nodes can interoperate without limiting the applications of sensor networks; and (2) integrating sensor networks to the Internet can be implemented easily with standard networking protocols. We use a simple environmental monitoring application to demonstrate that the proposed solution performs nearly as well as an implementation using standard TinyOS components in terms of packet delivery ratio. Furthermore, our approach provides the additional features of interoperability and seamless integration to the Internet while requiring 20% less ROM and 40% less RAM.