Managing Heterogeneous WSNs in Smart Cities: Challenges and Requirements

摘要

The dramatic advances in wireless communications and electronics have enabledthe development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs consist of manyaffordable and portable sensor nodes for collecting data from the environment.In this article, we address management requirements of WSNs through presentingsome key management scenarios in the Smart Cities context, such as intelligenttransportation systems, smart grids and smart buildings. The limited resourcesand heterogeneous characteristics of WSNs pose new challenges in networkmanagement, which include the presence of various faults, the difficulty inreplacing and repairing a large number of sensor nodes, the existence of anuncertain topology, and the resource allocation. To cope with these challenges,we first discuss advantages and disadvantages of centralized and distributedmanagement approaches and then discuss the benefit of the multilevel managementschema. Next, we present in detail the specific features for a WSN managementsystem such as lightweight, self-detection, self-configuration, sharinginfrastructure, service monitoring, plug and play, context awareness andinteroperability. Finally, we present the required mechanisms for some basicmanagement functions.