Design and Implementation of RESTful Wireless Sensor Network Gateways Using Node.js Framework

With proliferation of Cloud technologies, the need for connecting wireless sensor networks to Cloud servers arose. With easy accessibility to the cloud and the increased processing power of cloud servers, it became possible to gather data from sensor networks at different locations and process large amount of sensor data. A new generation WSN gateways is needed for this purpose in order to connect the sensors to cloud servers. In this paper, a design and implementation method for RESTful WSN Gateways is proposed using a Javascript based framework, Node.js, which uses asynchronous programming model and can handle a large amount of network connections simultaneously. The gateway is designed as an Embedded Linux device, which can handle multiple accesses with both sensors and cloud servers. All communication APIs residing inside the gateway is designed to be RESTful, HTTP API for communication with cloud servers and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) for sensor communication. The proposed approach in this paper provides seamless integration between cloud applications and sensors with its well-defined standard API and minimizes the development time of WSN gateways.