Building a bridge for heterogeneous sensor networks

Abstract

According as home networks become a practical reality, wireless sensor networks are getting increasingly into the spotlight to monitor and control environmental conditions at home. Some methods need to exchange information in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, such as different network protocol, different embedded operating system, and different manufacturers to produce sensor nodes. We propose an intelligent bridge as interoperable middleware architecture. This approach offers two contributions to the study of information exchange in heterogeneous constraints: First, we described rule management technique with interoperability in an intelligent bridge. Second, we defined general message exchange mechanism. They are composed of three factors. (1) A message format has elements which are message type, destination, source, number of message, and contents. (2) A message style is XML documents. (3) A message transmission protocol is SOAP, a lightweight XML-based messaging protocol. We conducted a case study on sensing event handle in home environment to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. We confirmed the effect of information exchange mechanism with extensibility and flexibility. © 2006 IEEE.