Open Wireless Sensor Network Telemetry Platform for Mobile Phones

Mobile phones are an underutilized resource for connecting low-power wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to the internet. WSNs typically expend most of their battery power on data transmission. Mobile phones carried by the public could enable a hybrid approach where data makes a low-power short distance hop to phones in the vicinity using Bluetooth or a similar short range protocol, then uses the phones' long distance connectivity to upload to the Internet. Because a large fraction of mobile phones have Bluetooth short-distance radio, this paper describes low-cost hardware for a generic WSN-to-Bluetooth gateway and open-source software that allows a wide subset of mobile phones to download and save WSN data.