VIP Bridge: Leading Ubiquitous Sensor Networks to the Next Generation

Some applications need to collect information from several heterogeneous sensor networks which are physically deployed in different places to provide comprehensive services. To reduce the complexity of querying from heterogeneous sensor networks, a uniform query interface should be provided for users, which requires that these different sensor networks should be integrated over IP based wired/wireless networks into one virtual sensor networks. However, how to connect these heterogeneous sensor networks with IP based networks by a unique solution is an advance issue for this integration problem. In this paper, we first analyze and compare existing solutions for connecting sensor networks with IP based wired/wireless networks, then based on analysis result we present the basic design principle and the key idea of VIP Bridge for connecting sensor networks with IP based wired/wireless networks. We describe a novel approach using VIP Bridge to integrate several different sensor networks into one virtual sensor network. Users can easily obtain data through both Interest based query and IP address based query from the virtual sensor network transparently. Based on comparison and prototyping work we claim that our new approach can cover most advantages of related research work. The most important contribution of VIP Bridge is that it first time successfully opens the door for leading ubiquitous sensor networks into the 4G paradigm.