Integrate WSN to the Web of things by using XMPP

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network is a promising technology thanks to its numerous beneficial applications. The recent trend towards Web of Things leverages substantial web technologies and toolkits, which greatly simplify the chore of WSN application development. However, the complex web server and heavy HTTP communications impose difficulties on portability of WSN applications and node's resources management. In order to provide a lightweight web integration and uniform data representation, we propose to employ XMPP, an open standard formalized by IETF, to build instant messaging and presence service for wireless sensor nodes. In this paper, we develop a scalable and flexible XMPP sensor bot to integrate WSN into generic XMPP architecture. We also design two lightweight XMPP extensions for sensor node representation and task configuration. The efficient XML expression in our extension protocol can squeeze the payload into a single IEEE 802.15.4 packet and does not cause XMPP message fragmentation. Our solution works directly on MAC layer without the need of TCP/IP stack. Based on our sensor bot, we propose a novel application for product validation and customer behavior analysis with RFID/NFC technology on smartphones to demonstrate a new context-aware service. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.