Towards the integration of heterogeneous wireless sensor platforms: A generic API approach

Gathering different pieces of information about the environmental parameters within certain places is becoming a cornerstone for a set of applications and services and is, in fact, bringing about the appearance of new ones. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) appear as a key enabler for this sort of functionality, being able to obtain the required information and transmitting it to concentrator nodes. However, there are different sensor platforms, usually not compatible among them and, under specific conditions, considering the advantages of each one, it might be sensible using more than one of them within the same application. This paper describes the design and implementation of a framework for WSN (WSN Adaptation Framework, WAF), which offers a generic API able to manage subjacent heterogeneous sensor platforms, thus allowing a homogenous usage of their functionalities, especially from the service developer perspective, who does not longer need to worry about the primitives specific to the different platforms. Furthermore, the paper shows two illustrative examples on the usage of the generic API.