Title: Developing a WSN internet gateway for an African context

Authors: G. De Villiers; A. Van der Byl; R.H. Wilkinson

Addresses: Shrike Marine, 503 Tollgate Industrial Centre, 12 Ravenscraig Road, Woodstock, 7925, South Africa ' Square Kilometre Array, South Africa (SKA-SA), 3rd Floor, The Park, Park Road, Pinelands, 7405, South Africa ' School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, RMIT University, 124 La Trobe Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining popularity in the industrial and academic communities as an unobtrusive and low power alternative solution to gather data from an everincreasing variety of environments and phenomena. This paper focuses on the development of a configurable, low power and cost-effective gateway based on an ARM9 microprocessor to link a WSN to the internet through the GSM network or an ethernet connection. A bespoke application written in Visual C# executed by Windows Embedded CE and a configurable hardware platform permit the functionality of the gateway to be adapted to the requirements of a WSN deployment. The gateway may be configured remotely and provides the WSN with persistent data storage and frequent data uploads to a file server via the internet. This study has been successful in the development of a generic gateway which was found to be more configurable and cost effective than previous gateway implementations.

Keywords: multi-tasking operating systems; sink nodes; data storage; low power; internet connection; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; Africa; GSM networks; ethernet connection; generic gateways.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2016.074271

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2016 Vol.20 No.1, pp.1 - 8

Accepted: 20 Feb 2015
Published online: 20 Jan 2016 *

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