Motivation

Different types of WSNs may be deployed in similar areas in order to measure semantically linked data, for example, temperature and humidity. Therefore, these data could be combined to enhance the accuracy of different WSNs without increasing their measurement rate and keeping their levels of energy consumption low.

What are the challenges?

  • Determine whether other WSNs are in an area of interest.
  • Handle heterogeneous data types.
  • Enable communication between WSNs in different ownerships.
  • Handle different data representations.

What is the traditional collaboration?

So far, collaboration methods are used as (internal) solutions for some problems of WSNs, such as coverage, localization, energy conservation, and security, or cooperatively monitoring and controlling objects (i.e. providing information to other systems). This work is meant to provide the missing link between both definitions: how to reduce the problems of WSNs, such as coverage and energy conservation, by cooperatively monitoring the environment.

Architectural Components

A new type of node, called an Enhanced Gateway (EG), is used as the contact point between the internal WSNs and the other EGs. They are directly connected to the respective WSN sink nodes and maintain an overlay connection to other EGs in order to exchange information about their networks and measured data. They have the following responsabilities:

  • Monitor

    Receives data either from internal or external WSNs and filters it to remove noise and errors by performing syntactic and semantic validations.

  • Analyze

    Builds the level of trustworthiness based on all received data, then infers the actual world using pattern-matching or threshold-based algorithms.

  • Plan & Schedule

    Checks the network's requirements and builds a plan to minimize the energy consumption without compromising the quality of the measurements. At the end, decides when apply the changes.