Smartphone with Augmented Gateway Functionality as Opportunistic WSN Gateway Device

Sensors and actuators are being increasingly deployed for monitoring and controlling different phenomena and processes in a stand-alone manner or attached to sensor nodes with communication capabilities as part of larger wireless sensor networks (WSN). In addition to the protocols for communication within the WSN, sensor nodes may also provide the gateway functionality towards other networks and/or support communication with other external devices. These devices either represent additional gateways for exposing data and metadata to external networks, or serve as connection points to WSN for instance for the on-site calibration and maintenance. Smartphones as advanced mobile terminals appear particularly suitable for such role. This paper investigates the role a smartphone augmented with WSN gateway functionality can play in WSN with respect to regular dedicated sensor and gateway nodes. As a practical example we show the implementation of a gateway augmented smartphone using a Samsung i8910 phone and a VESNA sensor node connected via Bluetooth. The role of a gateway augmented smartphone is to interface between WSN, which is using a proprietary networking protocol, and the mobile network. The data obtained from WSN can be enriched using smartphone’s embedded sensors before being sent to the remote server. We demonstrate this on an example of geo-tagging the collected data from WSN with the smartphone’s Global Positioning System-based location data.