Using Web Services for Bridging End-User Applications and Wireless Sensor Networks

Applications are the ultimate consumers of the information collected by sensors. There exist several frameworks for the interactions between end-user applications and sensors. They range from low-level APIs to databases and include Web Services. This paper is devoted to the use of Web Services for bridging end-user applications and wireless sensors networks. Its first contribution is a systematic evaluation of the current frameworks for the interactions between end-user applications and wireless sensors networks. The evaluation shows the potential of Web Services, compared to the other frameworks and motivates their usage in the case study. The second contribution is the definition of Web Services for the I-centric telecommunication services, and their implementation in a wireless sensor network that does not support Web Services. We demonstrate that Web Services are very promising as "bridges" and share the lessons we have learned.