VSIB: A Sensor Bus Architecture for Smart-Sensor Network

There has been a proliferation of real-time sensing application due to the recent technological improvements in small, inexpensive, low-power, and distributed "smart" sensor nodes capable of doing a small amount of data processing and storage. Sensor network coordinates a collection of these sensor nodes to enable a high quality detection and measurement network in great details. Sensors come in great variety with different capabilities from different vendors. Besides, there exists a variety of sensors interfaces i.e. analog (capacitive, inductive, and resistive readout), I²C, SPI, UART, for communicating sensor signals. Therefore, it is difficult to provide the required level of integration and functional flexibility which are of great importance in smart-sensor systems. Due to these various interfaces, the design of the versatile sensor interface bus is of great importance. This paper presents a versatile sensor interface bus (VSIB) architecture which offers network-independent communication interfaces for connecting sensors to microprocessors, instrumentation systems, and control/field networks. It is shown that it is easier to deploy commonly available sensors with various communication interfaces to a multi-sensor module.