An Architecture for Mobile Sensor Network Control Using IMS and Reconfigurable Hardware

Mobile sensors networks are used in several domains to perform various tasks related to monitoring, recording, and affecting the conditions of an environment. Interacting with mobile sensor networks deployed in public networks requires an application capable of securely exchanging data in the network, generating mobile sensor network requests and processing mobile sensor network responses. Embedded communications devices are an ideal platform through which mobile sensor network applications could be implemented due to their portability and preexisting facilities to establish network connections. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a communications framework permitting the exchange of data from communications devices across divergent networks. No research has been performed combining embedded devices and mobile sensor networks using public network facilities like IMS. This paper proposes an architecture permitting end users to perform mobile sensor network operations using IMS and embedded communications devices. The architecture is based on a reconfigurable hardware implementation of SIP to exchange data through an IMS network to query mobile sensor data, publish data to valid subscribers and control nodes. SIP is used to manage the sessions in which data are accessed by arbitrary users registered with a sensor network service.