H-WSNMS: A Web-Based Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks Management System Architecture

As heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being widely deployed for various applications, we are faced with a new challenge of network management for heterogeneous WSNs. On one hand, current available WSN management tools are either application specific, or platform specific, thus suffering from the lack of reusability in heterogeneous WSNs management environment. On the other hand, to develop a new WSN management system for heterogeneous WSNs from scratch is time consuming and may not be feasible. In this paper, motivated by such a challenge, we propose a novel WSN management system architecture targeted for heterogeneous WSNs (H-WSNMS). By introducing the concept of virtual command set, H-WSNMS decouples management functions for specific WSN applications from the individual WSN platforms. Therefore, H-WSNMS facilitates the reuse of each individual WSN´s preliminary management command service as much as possible, and at the same time, presents to users a unified management interface across multiple WSNs. We demonstrate H-WSNMS architecture though design and implementation of a prototype system.