Wireless Sensor Network interconnection protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are at high speed gaining in popularity. Because of this increased adoption, the need for integration with existing technologies becomes more prominent. In practice, a WSN is often deployed in environments where both wired and wireless data networks are also present. Consider for instance a WSN which acts as a climate monitoring or fire detection system in a large office building. As WSNs are typically networks with high constraints regarding resource efficiency, it would be beneficial if they could use the available data networks as additional transport medium for their internal data. In this paper we describe an interconnection protocol and associated sensor gateway design which enables the transparent use of both wired and wireless data networks by WSNs. Through this setup, the WSN will detect the non-sensor devices as virtual sensor nodes and consider them when determining the optimal routing paths.