Design and Implementation of Web-based Data and Network Management System for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Book excerpt: Today, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are forming an exciting new area to have dramatic impacts on science and engineering innovations. New WSN-based technologies, such as body sensor networks in medical and health care and environmental monitoring sensor networks, are emerging. Sensor networks are quickly becoming a flexible, inexpensive, and reliable platform to provide solutions for a wide variety of applications in real-world settings. The increase in the proliferation of sensor networks has paralleled the use of more heterogeneous systems in deployment. In this thesis, our work attempts to develop a new network management and data collection framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks called as Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks Management System (H-WSNMS), which enables to manage and operate various sensor network systems with unified control and management services and interface. The H-WSNMS framework aims to provide a scheme to manage, query, and interact with sensor network systems. By introducing the concept of Virtual Command Set (VCS), a series of unified application interfaces and Metadata (XML files) across multiple WSNs are designed and implement the scalability and flexibility of the management functions for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, which is demonstrated though through a series of web-based WSN management Applications such as Monitoring, Configuration, Reprogram, Data Collection and so on. The tests and application trials confirm the feasibility of our approach but also still reveal a number of challenges to be taken into account when deploying wireless sensor and actuator networks at industrial sites, which will be considered by our future research work.