The Design and Implementation of an Architecture for Flexible Access to Sensor Networks

In the light of the experiences from real-world sensor network deployments we are faced with the problem of accessing sensor networks. Sensor networks are made up of several sensor nodes using wireless communication to communicate. Due to the heterogeneity of sensor network implementations existing access methods are uniquely tailored to fit a particular sensor network deployment. During this thesis work an access architecture named Janus has been designed and implemented. Janus is designed to set a standard for providing uniform access to sensor networks. Janus offers a high degree of flexibility through on-demand dynamic negotiation of services and can be shown to support existing access techniques. Janus also separates the access services from the sensor network implementation allowing for easy upgrades and extensions. A prototype of Janus was also implemented to show the feasibility of the design. The prototype implementation has been successfully tested with a simple command line client connected to a sensor network made up of sensor nodes developed at Freie Universität in Berlin.