Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks and Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks for enhanced value-added services

In some situations where the standard telecommunication infrastructure is not available, Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) can be deployed to provide the required communication. These networks are established "on the fly" without a need for prior communication organization and are composed of autonomous mobile devices, such as cell phones, PDAs or laptops. In similar conditions, such as in emergency response operations, integrating MANETs and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can notably enhance the MANET participant's end-user experience. WSNs sense and aggregate ambient information, such as physiological, environmental or physical data related to a nearby phenomenon. The integration, which provides end-user availability to WSN required information, is feasible via gateways. However, when the ambient information collected by WSNs is intended for applications residing in MANETs, centralized and fixed gateways are not practicably feasible. This is mainly due to ad-hoc nature, lack of centralized control and constraints on the end-user devices that are used in MANETs. These devices are usually limited in power and capacity and cannot host centralized gateways. In this thesis we exploit the integration of WSN and MANET in order to provide novel value-added services which enhance the end-user experience of MANET participants. Motivating scenarios are introduced, background information is presented, requirements are derived and the state of the art regarding the integration of WSN with existing networks, including MANETs, is evaluated. Based on the evaluation, none of the existing solutions satisfies all of our derived requirements. Therefore, we propose an overall two-level overlay architecture to integrate WSNs (with mobile sinks) and MANETs. This architecture is based on the distributed gateway and applications which form the P2P overlays. Overlays are application-layer networks which are created on top of the exiting MANET. To interconnect gateway and application overlays we derive corresponding requirements and evaluate the existing approaches. Since none of these approaches fulfills all of our requirements, we propose protocols, mechanisms and design corresponding modules for the interconnection of overlays. Finally we refine our overall architecture based on the interconnection aspects. As a proof of concept, we implement a prototype for the inter-overlay information exchange. This implementation is based on SIP extensions and uses two existing P2P middlewares. We also simulate our prototype using Oversim simulation tool and collect experimental results. Based on these results, we can see that our architecture is a valid and promising approach for interconnecting different P2P overlays and can be deployed to provide the overall solution for WSN and MANET integrated system