Towards a zero-configuration wireless sensor network architecture for smart buildings

Today's buildings account for a large fraction of our energy consumption. In an effort to economize scarce fossil fuels on earth, sensor networks are a valuable tool to increase the energy efficiency of buildings without severely reducing our quality of life. Within a smart building many sensors and actuators are interconnected to form a control system. Nowadays, the deployment of a building control system is complicated because of different communication standards. In this paper, we present a web services-based approach to integrate resource constrained sensor and actuator nodes into IP-based networks. A key feature of our approach is its capability for automatic service discovery. For this purpose, we implemented an API to access services on sensor nodes following the architectural style of representational state transfer (REST). We implemented a prototype application based on TinyOS 2.1 on a custom sensor node platform with 8 Kbytes of RAM and an IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio transceiver.