Web based monitoring and control of WSN using WINGZ (Wireless IP network gateway for Zigbee)

Recent times ZigBee based wireless sensor networks are gaining popularity in various application domain areas like healthcare, structural health monitoring, home and commercial building automation, industrial automation, transportation, agriculture etc. ZigBee standard provides various domain specific application profiles. The sensors are interfaced to ZigBee communication modules to form a wireless personal area network. In order to control and communicate to these networks from backbone infrastructure networks viz. 2G/3G/4G/Wi-Fi a wireless enabled gateway is essential. The hardware platforms and software framework for such Gateways need to be application domain independent to make the systems generic. The work that has been presented in this paper focuses on hardware system design issues and options, software framework and application case studies. The gateway subsystem has been enabled with sufficient storage for local data buffering. The system consists of three modules namely WINGZ (Wireless IP Network Gateway for Zigbee), Ubimote (Wireless ZigBee mote with generic sensor interface) and Ubi-Sense (Generic Sensor board) for application case study. The Gateway Related hardware and software systems enable anywhere connectivity of networked sensors. The heart of the system is WINGZ which is an android based multi protocol wireless gateway supporting WLAN, HSPA (High Speed Packet Access), ZigBee and Ethernet.