A scalable and flexible communication protocol in a heterogeneous network

Abstract

Traditional communication protocols focus on how to integrate a single wireless network with the Internet. Thus data from all wireless devices in that network can be gathered, sank, and provided to users via a friendly interface using web pages. These protocols offer limited automation. Much training is required for users to analyse data from different wireless networks. To resolve this issue, recently many researchers are contributing to design and implement an appropriate protocol for the communication between a heterogeneous wireless network and the Internet [1-3]. In this paper, we present a scalable and flexible communication protocol which is designed to work as an interface between the Internet and various wireless networks in a heterogeneous network, to store information and to provide web services to end users. Using web services, users can interact with wireless devices remotely and easily. The current implementation is based on a Linux server. This server uses different communication interfaces to talk to various wireless networks. From these communication interfaces, data is acquired, processed, and stored in the server. Algorithms are developed to analyse data in data processing stage to maximize automation. Meanwhile this server works as a web server and provides web services to remote users. Current studied wireless protocols include ZigBee, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. And our communication protocol can be scaled to work with more wireless protocols and developed into a distributed system.