Managing heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Despite of the development of wireless sensor networks in recent years, there lacks a general mechanism to manage these network devices. Because most managing mechanisms for wireless sensor networks are proprietary, when multiple platforms of wireless sensors networks are deployed together, interoperability and scalability would become a big issue. In this paper, we propose to utilize Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as a common platform to manage heterogeneous wireless sensors networks. SIP is a mature protocol for signalling, and it is used in network management in addition to its popular adoption in voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). SIP supports registration and re-direction, providing a great scalability and flexibility for network management. To develop the sensor management system with SIP support, we utilize the Sofia-SIP library to develop the SIP user agent, and adopt OpenSER as the SIP server. After SIP user agents register to the SIP server, we can send SIP messages to these end devices to control them. Furthermore, we develop a web platform to support sending SIP messages via a PHP script, which enables us to send SIP instant messages as control messages easily even with web browsers on mobile phones. Being verified on experimental platforms, the results showed that our system can be applied to different kinds of networks, such as IEEE802.11 and IEEE802.15.4.