Practical framework for opportunistic direct interconnection between Wireless Sensor Networks with native communication protocols

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a key element in IoT as the interface with the physical world. To help integrating WSNs with IoT, this research suggests that co-located WSN domains should be able to engage in collaboration schemes with direct interconnections opportunistically. However, many factors can in influence the preferences of communication protocols in each network domain. Therefore, This work studies the practical solution for enabling Opportunistic Direct Interconnections (ODI) between co-located WSNs with different communication protocols by implementing the concept in real hardware. OI-MAC is used as the starting point of the study since the literature is the only the previous work proposing the solution in this direction, according to the best of author knowledge. We propose that WSNs should discovery neighbouring domains and communicate across their boundaries by using a shared MAC protocol. The nodes, which discover a co-located network domain, act as a gateway to communicate with the discovered neighbour.

The practical implementation confirms the feasibility of ODI in the real hardware. This work reformulates the ODI framework in literature. The lessons learned reveal the details of handshake process and reduces the modifications in NET layer.

The investigation leads to the newly proposed shared MAC protocol, which reduces the impacts of ODI on the implemented network. The evaluation shows the reduction of radio occupancy and the improvement of latency and reliability.

This work suggests modelling application data as resources and demonstrates that the connection provided by ODI can support the application exchange in forms of resource discovery and resource access with RESTful services.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Nicholas Harris: orcid.org/0000-0003-4122-2219

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