SNAIL gateway: Dual-mode wireless access points for WiFi and IP-based wireless sensor networks in the internet of things

One of the important challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) is how to acquire the physical context of things. IP-based wireless sensor networks (IP-WSNs) could be a promising approach to collecting the physical context of things and to integrating WSNs to the Internet. However, realizing IP-WSNs in IoT exposes two major challenges. One is how to embed the Internet Protocol (IP) in resource-constrained sensor nodes. The other is how to achieve real-world deployment of WSNs and its integration with the Internet on the fly and on the cheap. In this paper, we present the SNAIL (Sensor Networks for All-IP World) project and introduce a new type of IP-WSN gateway, which supports dual wireless access points for WiFi and IP-WSN, enabling deployment of SNAIL nodes in an easy and rapid manner as for the solution. To show the proof-of-concept, we implement a new SNAIL platform from tiny sensor nodes to a gateway.