Integrating custom hardware into Sensor Web

The sensor web is typically composed of heterogeneous wireless sensors, which share the information that can be used by all network platforms. This requires sensor nodes to conform to a given system architecture and implement appropriate communication protocols. In this paper, we considered the challenge of integrating custom hardware into the Sensor Web. We propose a system architecture in which IP enabled custom hardware nodes running Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) can be plugged into the sensor web. We analyze the main components of the system: our custom hardware node called Versatile Sensor Node (VSN), the IP protocol stack implementations and CoAP, a lightweight HTTP - like protocol defined for embedded devices that leverages web integration. On an empty parking space detection case study we show how VSN nodes running Contiki and CoAP protocol integrate into the web allowing the provision of advanced navigation services.