Description
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are originally standalone networks, where sensor readings are usually disseminated towards the sinks located in the boundary of the networks. However, numerous WSN applications lead to the need of interconnecting WSNs to the external networks, e.g., the Internet, to broaden WSN appplications into another domain. The interconnection of WSNs to the Internet also relaxs the control and management tasks of WSNs under dynamic changes of the environment.
The application-level gateway is currently a dominant approach for internetworking WSNs with the Internet. The reasons are multi-fold. Firstly, this approach completely decouples the two networks. This naturally allows for specialized communication protocols to be implemented in the WSN. Secondly, this approach is easy to implement, save the cost to apply, and support the internetworking efficiently on heterogeneous networks. Finally, many standards of this approach have been accepted in the industry for specific WSN applications, including ZigBee, wirelessHART, and ISA100.11a.
However, recent advances on the implementation of TCP/IP protocol suite for micro processor architecture, and on the standardization of adaptation techniques on running TCP/IP over 802.15.4, have led the modified TCP a very competitive approach, compared to the application-level gateway, on internetworking WSNs with the Internet.
Thus, the purpose of this research is to study the cost (signaling overhead, energy/resource consumption) and benefit (packet delivery ratio, latency, reliablity) between two competitive directions: application-level gateway (e.g., WSN-Transport-Protocol/ZigBee/802.15.4) vs. modified TCP (e.g., TCP/IPv6/6LoWPAN/802.15.4), for internetworking WSNs with the Internet. Validation is expected to carry out both in the simulation (e.g., ns-2) and the WSN testbed (e.g., ArchRock). The output of this research will be integrated into the internetworking functions of management plane in DCM-Arch, within the SWISNET project.
Links:
http://www.ifi.uio.no/forskning/grupper/nd/projects/swisnet/
Program
Informatikk