PBN: A seamless network infrastructure of heterogeneous network nodes

The research and development of wireless sensor technology are active in recent years. One of the applied use of the sensors is to integrate into living environment for context-aware ubiquitous services. A construction of the service requires to seamlessly cooperate the heterogeneous networks, e.g., wireless sensor networks and TCP/IP networks. The seamless network infrastructure needs to cope with some types of heterogeneity of the network. We analyze the heterogeneity and classify the requirements for the seamless network infrastructure as the following four types of transparency. 1) Network transparency, which enables to communicate the heterogeneous network nodes each other. 2) Node location transparency, which enables sensor nodes placed apart communicate each other. 3) Data format transparency, which translates the data format heterogeneity between the heterogeneous network nodes. 4) Control protocol transparency, which enables to communicate sensor nodes leveraging heterogeneous service protocols. Lots of existing works focus on the same issues. Their proposition is to hide the heterogeneity by middleware. The middleware offers an efficient APIs for constructing a new ubiquitous service using heterogeneous network nodes. However, existing software cannot be run on the middleware because of the API difference. In addition, application developers need to learn new APIs to leverage the middleware. We present a personal belongings network (PBN) mechanism, of which the design goal is to offer an seamless networking infrastructure enabling the existing software run on it, and to keep the application development cost low. To meet the goal, we focus on the requirement 1) and 2) for this paper. Since the PBN mechanism keeps the existing network environment, a collaboration with the mentioned existing works is easily possible.