Event-driven messaging services over integrated cellular and wireless sensor networks: Prototyping experiences of a visitor system

Abstract

As one of the killer applications, instant messaging has become a simple yet efficient tool for peer-to-peer communications in data networks. In telephone networks, short message services are gaining more popularity as well. However, this kind of services typically operates in their own respective networks and is triggered by fairly simple events (such as pushing a "send" button or prescheduling the transmission at later time). A promising direction is to trigger instant messages by environmental information from the physical world. In light of this, this paper proposes to establish an event-driven messaging service over a cellular-and-sensor-integrated network. We have prototyped a system which adopts Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) as the cellular network, and Bluetooth technology as the sensor network. The latter is to realize a Bluetooth surveillance network with location-sensing capabilities to be deployed within an office building area. While using other technologies is possible, GSM and Bluetooth are two dominating technologies in telephone and data networks. So the proposed technology is immediately feasible, given the fact that many handsets are already Bluetooth-enabled. Through this combination, we demonstrate a visitor system (VS) that offers several attractive features/services for visitors arriving at an office. First, messaging services in VS are driven by preconfigured events which can be collected from the Bluetooth surveillance network. Simple events might be a person entering/leaving a space, while complicated events might be a compound logic statement involving multiple users and multiple locations in VS. Second, we believe that the proposed system justifies the potential of cross-network applications and services. Third, the proposed architecture takes a modular approach by dividing the system into several subsystems according to their functionality. Logically dispatching jobs is the key to future extensions and further value-added services. The system architecture and implementation details are reported. Performance analyses are presented to model the detection latency of a Bluetooth sensor network.