Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

HANDBOOK 2 SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION
A Health Monitoring Application for Wireless Sensor Networks
Abolghasem (Hamid) Asgari and Mark Irons
Thales Research and Technology (TRT) Limited, Worton Drive, Reading RG2 0SB, UK
{Hamid.Asgari, Mark.Irons}@thalesgroup.com
Abstract
Operational health monitoring of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is
becoming an essential part of these networks. A WSN health
monitoring application is distinct from the sensor data visualisation as
each is aimed at different audiences i.e., the WSN health monitor is
intended to aid those who set-up and maintain the network, while the
sensor data visualisation is aimed at building/facilities managers or
the building occupants for comfort monitoring and awareness. Health
monitoring should provide an indication of sensor node failures,
resource exhaustion, poor connectivity, and other abnormalities.
There are several problems that may result in the WSN gateway not
receiving sensor data, for example, low battery voltage or poor
connectivity to the gateway. It is very time consuming to resolve such
problems if there is no means of monitoring the operation of the
WSN. This necessitates the development of an easy to understand,
visual method of monitoring the health of the WSN in real-time. We
have developed an application that is capable of monitoring the
operational health of a deployed WSN and displaying the results
through a browser-based user interface. The sensor nodes collect
environmental data and periodically send the updates, which are
stored by the virtual gateway in a database. The WSN health
monitoring tool is implemented as an enterprise Java application that
exposes a REST interface through which the virtual gateway can
provide required sensor information.
Keywords: wireless sensor networks, service oriented architecture, network health monitoring,
security, REST-based SOA
Introduction
The emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has brought significant benefits as far as
building/environmental monitoring is concerned, since they are more cost-efficient (because of the
lack of wired installations) compared to their wired counterparts, while additionally they allow for
flexible positioning of the sensor devices. Any WSN architecture should be designed to allow its
straightforward integration to the general networking infrastructure where any other application can
utilize the data gathered by WSN. The common approach to achieve this is the Service Oriented
Architectures (SOA) open framework where all architectural elements are decoupled and considered
as service providers and consumers. Service discovery and access to the services is performed in a
dynamic manner, ensuring a generic and extensible design. Web Services constitute the most
significant technological enabler of SOAs due to the interoperability they offer and that they can
easily support integration of existing systems. In I3CON project, we have designed, developed,
implemented, and deployed a WSN architectural framework to be used by other applications over an
SOA infrastructure [1], [2], [3], [4].
The functionality of the WSN architecture is decomposed in two complementing aspects, namely:
• WSN services exposed to applications (service consumers) by means of enterprise middleware.
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