Dynamically reconfigurable gateway architecture for heterogeneous sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, sensor network technologies are being applied to more places such as smart homes, offices and universities, and are considered a main component of ubiquitous computing. However, the utilization of sensor network in the smart home environment does not come up to this expectation because of the heterogeneity of sensor nodes. Moreover, the smart home has to be consumer friendly environment and users should be able to use sensor network by defining various smart operations to meet their dedicated scenarios. To overcome these problems, we presented the dynamically reconfigurable gateway architecture for the interoperability among heterogeneous sensor networks. U-BOSS (Universal Bridge of Sensor NetworkS), core part of this architecture, is the universal sensor network gateway server based on the OSGi framework, which provides the uniform interfaces to access to heterogeneous sensor networks that are composed of various kinds of sensors and actuators in a smart home environment. It can also support to the multi-purpose programming that enables to improve the utilization of sensor network resources because the operations of sensor or actuator node can be used to multiple applications for user wanted services which is defined by rules. For these features, we introduced our notable concepts: $\It{Sensor Network Driver}$ and $\It{Rule-based Sensor Network programming}$. We also implemented our prototype system to show the cooperation among heterogeneous sensor nodes using our own sensor hardware platform called ANTS-H2 and the Crossbow MICA as the sensor node.