IP-enabled wireless sensor networks and their integration into the internet

Sensor networks become more and more important in various application areas and several application scenarios require connectivity between sensor network and the Internet. Especially scenarios of disaster management would benefit from IP-enabled sensor networks, providing a seamless integration in WAN infrastructures without a requirement for deploying proxies that convert between communication technologies.Preparing sensor networks for IP communication and integrating them into the Internet demand for certain features and specification work, e.g. the adaptation of the respective link technology for IP support, development of security mechanisms, and specification of ad hoc networking and autoconfiguration to support ad hoc deployment. Moreover, in case sensor networks are moving from the IP point of view, which depends on the actual application scenario, mobility management is required. Especially interesting for sensor networks is the deployment of IPv6, providing a huge address space suitable to address large sensor networks globally, providing built-in autoconfiguration via IPv6 neighbor discovery and IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration, and supporting network mobility (NEMO).We will motivate the work presented in this paper by describing promising applications and by discussing the benefits of IP-enabled sensor networks compared to non-IP sensor networks. Afterwards we investigate the required functions and protocols to provide such a system and give examples for protocols and function realizations. We will investigate in more detail how to provide autoconfiguration and mobility management. Finally, we will design a system and its functional blocks that aid in disaster management. The system consists of an IPv6-enabled sensor network connected to a central management station via different WAN technologies.