On a IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee to IEEE 802.11 gateway for the ART-WiSe architecture

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been attracting growing interests for developing a new generation of large-scale embedded computing systems, with a great potential for a wide range of applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, emergency medical response or building automation. However, the communication paradigms in wireless sensor networks differ from the ones associated to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols and architectures. The ART-WiSe (architecture for real-time communications in wireless sensor networks) framework aims at the design of a scalable multiple-tiered WSN architecture for supporting large-scale embedded computing applications with critical requirements. An overlay wireless local area network (Tier-2) serves as a backbone for a WSN (Tier 1), relying on existing standard communication protocols and commercial-off-the-shell (COTS) technologies -IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee for Tier 1 and IEEE 802.11 for Tier-2. This paper outlines ongoing work on the design of the architectural requirements and features for a QoS-aware gateway between both networks.