A service-based approach for the uniform access of wireless sensor networks and custom application tasks running on sensor nodes

Abstract

For reasons of convenience and interoperability, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically accessed by remote client applications through well-defined service-oriented interfaces. In addition, significant flexibility can be gained by letting clients install and run custom, application-specific sensing and processing tasks directly on the nodes of the WSN. However, this raises the issue of how clients can interact with such tasks in parallel to the regular access of the WSN. We propose an approach for supporting both information flows simultaneously and in a uniform way, via an open web-based service interface that can be flexibly extended through appropriate XML descriptions which specify the format of the respective message exchanges. This allows clients to perform both the regular interactions with the WSN and the custom interactions with the application tasks that have been deployed on the sensor nodes, using a single and well-established interface technology. Moreover, the WSN gateway can perform the mapping between the client interface protocol and the WSN-level protocol for both regular and custom accesses, by using the same message parsing/conversion engine. The paper presents our design, describes a prototype implementation, discusses an indicative application example, and evaluates the access overhead of our prototype and the benefits of deploying custom sensing tasks in the WSN. © 2018, Springer International Publishing AG.