TinySIP: Providing Seamless Access to Sensor-based Services

Recent technological trends are transforming sensor nodes from passive data-gathering entities to a collaborative network of sensors; capable of providing data-related and event-related information services. Such a sensor-based information service is useful only if it can be seamlessly accessed across traditional networks and through familiar device interfaces. In order to enable such ubiquitous access to sensor-based services, we need a remote messaging protocol that supports versatile messaging options, interoperates over different types of network, and allows messages to be routed based on flexible attribute-based addressing of endpoints. Furthermore, in order to ensure ease of adoption and deployment within an enterprise as well as in consumer environments, we must leverage communication abstractions that are well-known and already supported on traditional networks. In this paper, we propose TinySIP as a communication abstraction for accessing sensor-based services. TinySIP is based on the session initiation protocol (SIP), which is a standard application-level signaling mechanism. Users on traditional networks remotely interact with a sensor network service by sending SIP messages. A gateway maps the SIP abstractions to the corresponding TinySIP abstractions and propagates the messages to the sensor nodes. We are currently planning on deploying the SIP-based solution that we propose on a research testbed to enable users on a wireless mesh to access the in-network storage and event correlation services offered by a sensor network consisting of 20 MicaZ sensor nodes