A heterogeneous sensor network architecture for highly mobile users

Wireless sensor networks and personal area networks are two relatively new and emerging technologies, capable of addressing a large number of applications such as home automation, medical monitoring, and sports monitoring. This article presents a new sensor network architecture suitable for emerging applications that require a highly mobile group of persons, such as fire fighters or assault teams, to be monitored in real-time. The architecture combines features from WSN, such as mesh routing and efficient communication, with the benefits of using a PAN architecture communicating with standardized Bluetooth profiles and the TCP/IP protocol suite. The use of Bluetooth enables the proposed architecture to use a user's mobile phone in order to achieve Internet connectivity, and IEEE 802.15.4 to create an internal mesh network. This dual-radio approach is necessary since today's mobile phones lack support for radio technologies traditionally utilized by WSNs. Performed tests indicate that the approach can support dependable delivery of sensor data to the Internet from a group of highly mobile users.