Ubiquitous Monitoring Solution for Wireless Sensor Networks with Push Notifications and End-to-End Connectivity

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) belongs to a new trend in technology in which tiny and resource constrained devices are wirelessly interconnected and are able to interact with the surrounding environment by collecting data such as temperature and humidity. Recently, due to the huge growth in the use of mobile devices with Internet connection, smartphones are becoming the center of future ubiquitous wireless networks. Interconnecting WSNs with smartphones and the Internet is a big challenge and new architectures are required due to the heterogeneity of these devices. Taking into account that people are using smartphones with Internet connection, there is a good opportunity to propose a new architecture for wireless sensors monitoring using push notifications and smartphones. Then, this paper proposes a ubiquitous approach for WSN monitoring based on a REST Web Service, a relational database, and an Android mobile application. Real-time data sensed by WSNs are sent directly to a smartphone or stored in a database and requested by the mobile application using a well-defined RESTful interface. A push notification system was created in order to alert mobile users when a sensor parameter overcomes a given threshold. The proposed architecture and mobile application were evaluated and validated using a laboratory WSN testbed and are ready for use.