A gateway-based inter-PAN binding mechanism for ZigBee sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), a binding is an association between a sensor and an actuator. The binding mechanism defined in the ZigBee specification is restricted within a personal area network (PAN). For a complex WSN application, it is desired to have an inter-PAN binding mechanism to combine sensors and actuators from different PANs, respectively. In this paper, we have proposed a gateway-based inter-PAN binding mechanism for global event detection and action invocation. By collecting device capabilities from each intra-PAN gateway, an inter-PAN gateway is used to create a binding specification. Once all events defined in the binding specification are received from related intra-PAN gateways, the inter-PAN gateway would initiate corresponding actions on all associated intra-PAN gateways. To demonstrate the practicality, an inter-PAN binding system for ZigBee sensors and actuators has been implemented based on the universal plug and play (UPnP) and representational state transfer (REST) Web services for intra-PAN gateway discovery and device capability collection. Also, a Web-based wizard has been provided to create binding specification. It is believed that the technique presented in this paper would enable the interaction between ZigBee PANs to perform wide-ranging WSN applications.