Sensor Networks’ Integration - Application and Multidisciplinary Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks - page 81

Chapter 5
Sensor Networks' Integration

Szymon Fedor, Alex Gluhak, and Srdjan Krco

5.1 Introduction - Motivations for SN Integration

Frameworks

5.1.1 Picture of Current WSN Deployments, Problems Related

Sensor networks and applications thereof have been intensively researched in the
past decade and a variety of systems have been meanwhile deployed in real-world
settings. Most of these applications and the corresponding sensor networks they use
are designed as vertically integrated systems [ 1-3 ]. In such vertical systems, a sensor
network or a limited set of mostly homogeneous sensor networks are deployed for
a specific application in mind. The application is mostly the sole user of this sensor
network and has a priori knowledge of the capabilities that the sensor network(s)
provides. An application also typically knows how to address the respective gate-
ways/sinks of the sensor networks, in order to interact with the sensor networks and
shares a common interaction protocol with them.
As the number of the sensor networks that may be used by an application grows,
it is becoming increasingly cumbersome for applications to manage direct
interactions between those. Furthermore, the reuse of the existing sensor network
infrastructure for multiple applications could avoid redundant deployment of
similar sensor networks at the same location and provide higher returns for the
initial investments costs of the deployed sensor network infrastructure. Recent
research has therefore focused on overcoming the inflexibility of the tightly coupled
vertical system and proposed several sensor network integration frameworks [ 3-6 ].
These frameworks aim to break up the vertical systems into horizontal reusable
system components and make them available to a larger set of applications.
The frameworks typically provide support functionality that significantly reduces