Internet based data collection and monitoring for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The omnipresence of the Internet and the advances in integrated circuit technologies has expanded the potential modes of communication and data collection. Adding Internet capabilities to any electronic device greatly extends the device's user interface, allowing the user to remotely configure and monitor the device over the network through the embedded web server. The embedded web server is expected to establish two-way communication and serve dynamic web pages using very limited resources. We adapted an existing embedded web server to allow remote control and monitoring of wireless sensor networks (WSN). This required establishing an interface to the WSN and developing firmware and user programs to communicate with the remote client. An interactive and flexible web-based user management interface is developed to allow the two-way interaction between the remote user and the wireless sensor network. The embedded server generates email alerts to the administrator about critical issues in the WSN, provides secure access to the WSN control modules, etc. Two embedded web servers are developed using different hardware platforms. The first solution is a low cost, energy efficient solution with somewhat limited functionality. The other uses a more powerful microcontroller-based platform and implements a fully-functional, dynamic web server with multiple web pages.