Autonomous and Interoperable Smart Sensors for Environmental Monitoring Applications

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous and interoperable smart sensors that employ the IEEE1451 standardization in pervasive environments. These devices contain a power management submodule based on energy harvesting techniques in order to enlarge their useful lifetime. Low power wireless technologies, such as IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee and 6LoWPAN have been used to determine the interoperability of smart sensors through experimental tests by using Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) architectures. This work establishes a new Finite State Machine (FSM), a compressed transducer electronic data sheets model and a reduced set of IEEE1451 standard commands due to the limits of the present IEEE1451 standard. For tests, the base station is modeled such as gateway, to design the Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP), and the Wireless Transducer Interface Module (WTIM) is an environmental sensor node. The conclusions drawn from this work will be used as guidelines for the implementation of interoperable wireless sensors networks based on autonomous smart sensors for environmental monitoring tasks.