Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks in the NATO Network Enabled Capability using Web services

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are expected to provide greatly enhanced situational awareness for warfighters in the battlefield. Sensors widespread in the battlefield are however, of very limited value unless the sensors are reliable during the entire operation and the information produced is accessed in a timely manner. In this paper we focus on these issues by enabling WSNs as a capability in the NATO Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) using Web services. We demonstrate that Web services is an enabling technology for information-sharing, facilitating presentation of sensed data and alarms to a battlefield management system. In addition, we show the feasibility of using a Web services approach as a query processing tool enabling multi-sensor fusion and data aggregation in the WSN domain. The networking protocols can in this way inherently adjust data-aggregation and -processing criteria according to the requirements posed by external subscriber systems. In this way, energy efficiency, which is paramount in WSNs, is optimized without sacrificing the flexibility of Web services. Our proposed methods are tested using practical experiments with TelosB sensing nodes.