Intelligent Reconfigurable Gateway for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

摘要

The realization of intelligent services relies on ubiquitous data access which is envisaged by the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). The foundation of IoT is the rapid growth in the area of Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs). However, diversity and heterogeneity of WSANs in terms of communication networks pose challenges in integrating a wide range of networks into a unified IoT infrastructure. Redesigning communication infrastructure to accommodate different or new networks increases engineering time and cost. To address the inflexibility an FPGA-based reconfigurable gateway architecture is proposed in this paper. Any number and type of radio interfaces can be plugged in and made operational directly during runtime without decommissioning and redesigning the entire gateway device. By using this gateway, physically incompatible protocols are bridged to achieve seamless communications. Software layers running on top of the gateway virtualize the underlying heterogeneous networks and hence enable transparent communications for higher level intelligent services. The implemented prototype was evaluated using three use cases to demonstrate flexible and reconfigurable integration of heterogeneous WSANs.