Translucent middleware approach to facilitate WSN access management

Recent advances in wireless communications have motivated the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for low-cost and easy-deployable physical and environmental monitoring. WSNs were typically accessible only through special WSN nodes acting as WSN data sinks and gateways towards standard IP-based networks. The recent diffusion of low-power IP network protocol implementations has (potentially) made all WSN nodes directly reachable over IP. However, the wide variety of communication platforms makes it difficult to glue together different access types. We propose an original solution for WSN gateway-/IP-based access integration based on the primary design guideline of exploiting a proxy component to facilitate WSN access management. Our proposal is fully compliant with latest communication standards and adopts a novel (translucent) approach to enable either fully-transparent or fully-aware WSN access control. Our experimental results show good data delivery performances with different WSN access types and evaluate the cost of our management support.