Networked autonomous smart sensors and dynamic reconfigurable application development tool for online monitoring systems

Abstract

Autonomous smart sensor is a highly integrated turn-key device, operates independently and owns itself life cycle. Networked sensors exchange information with protocols; we designed an application-layer protocol named AgileSN making sensor nodes interoperable and interchangeable. AgileSN sensor node itself and captured data that protocol carried are self-descriptive, with these smart capabilities, sensor nodes can be automatically detected or searched by interested peers or sink nodes, and sensor data can be parsed dynamically on the fly without human intervention, made autonomous sensor nodes plug and play in the network world. Like WEB system, well accepted network protocol make networked sensors interchangeable and interoperable, universal sensor tools are possible to process sensed data. We have designed a component-based software tool for sensor application development. In this software environment, all application functionalities are realized through software components, each component is designed to finish a special task, like reading data from networked sensors, data processing, visual presentation, network or local file I/O, HMI, etc. sensor data is processed sequentially by several components through data flow. A component can operate in its own thread, carefully designed component makes the whole data processing flow operates in pipeline mode, greatly improve data processing throughput. Components and data routes can be created and destroyed at runtime, so the application system functionality is reconfigured. We apply the Petri Net tool to model components and the whole application system, investigate their function and performance, present a non-collision high-performance soft-bus for inter-component data transfer, investigate the hazard phenomenon that exists in a multi-input component, and propose technical means to eliminate it.