A heterogeneous sensor network architecture for highly mobile users

Wireless sensor networks and personal area networks are two relatively new and emerging technologies, capable of addressing a large number of applications such as home automation, medical monitoring, and sports monitoring. This article presents a new sensor network architecture suitable for emerging applications that require a highly mobile group of persons, such as fire fighters or assault teams, to be monitored in real-time. The architecture combines features from WSN, such as mesh routing and efficient communication, with the benefits of using a PAN architecture communicating with standardized Bluetooth profiles and the TCP/IP protocol suite. The use of Bluetooth enables the proposed architecture to use a user´s mobile phone in order to achieve Internet connectivity, and IEEE 802.15.4 to create an internal mesh network. This dual-radio approach is necessary since today´s mobile phones lack support for radio technologies traditionally utilized by WSNs. Performed tests indicate that the approach can support dependable delivery of sensor data to the Internet from a group of highly mobile users.