Gateway Design for Data Gathering Sensor Networks

Innovation in gateways for data gathering sensor networks has lagged compared to advances in mote-class devices, leaving us with a limited set of options for deploying such systems. In this paper we outline the system design of a gateway that meets the hardware and software demands of data gathering networks and present a prototype implementation of this design using the popular Stargate platform. The gateway communicates with the back-end servers through a periodic query-response protocol which is robust to connectivity outages. Commands from the back-end servers instruct the gateway to wake up the sensor network, perform bulk data downloads, and finally upload the collected measurements to a remote server. We investigate mechanisms to minimize energy consumption at the gateway including completely powering it off in between query intervals and batching data uploads. While we ground our design using the Stargate device and evaluate its power consumption using different long-haul radios, we present several platforms which could become viable alternatives in terms of their cost/performance ratio.