Abstract
The tracking of multiple wireless mobile nodes is not easy with current legacy WSN technologies, due to their inherent technical complexity, especially when heavy traffic and frequent movement of mobile nodes are encountered. To enable mobile asset tracking under these legacy WSN systems, it is necessary to design a specific system architecture that can manage numerous mobile nodes attached to mobile assets. In this paper, we present a practical system architecture including a communication protocol, a three-tier network, and server-side middleware for mobile asset tracking in legacy WSNs consisting of mobile-stationary co-existing infrastructures, and we prove the functionality of this architecture through careful evaluation in a test bed. Evaluation was carried out in a microwave anechoic chamber as well as on a straight road near our office. We evaluated communication mobility performance between mobile and stationary nodes, location-awareness performance, system stability under numerous mobile node conditions, and the successful packet transfer rate according to the speed of the mobile nodes. The results indicate that the proposed architecture is sufficiently robust for application in realistic mobile asset tracking services that require a large number of mobile nodes.
Highlights
The rapid advancement of technology related to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased the development of location-based service fields, such as mobile asset tracking, home networking, environmental control and monitoring, safety systems, and personal health care [1,2,3,4].For mobile asset tracking systems in particular, additional design considerations are required along with the basic WSN system design considerations such as low power consumption and tiny size
Since the number of communication nodes can amount to thousands in a given service, an effective system architecture is necessary despite limited available resources
We developed a test bed consisting of 300 mobile nodes, four stationary nodes, four gateways, one server, and one smart tablet in order to evaluate the proposed mobile asset tracking system
Summary
The rapid advancement of technology related to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased the development of location-based service fields, such as mobile asset tracking, home networking, environmental control and monitoring, safety systems, and personal health care [1,2,3,4]. The mobile nodes transfer their current location, service-related requests, and response data, such as environmental sensing values and control requests, by sending messages asynchronously to the stationary node that is in the best communicative position. In the sensor network tier, we adopted the ZigBee protocol for communication amongst stationary nodes since it provides a stable network implementation for stationary nodes and has been well established in numerous legacy WSN architectures. The middleware manages the current locations of the mobile nodes in real-time and routes the messages received from a source mobile node to a destination mobile node for an asynchronous message delivery The reported data, such as current location and environmental sensor values, are saved in an internal database located on the server.
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