A flexible services and communications gateway for smart home and monitoring applications

Deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSN) has become an established means of monitoring processes and situations in a variety of application fields. Using such a technological platform for providing services to different stakeholders (such as tenants and operators) at once enables monitoring and communications to be combined cost-efficiently. The results of advanced development efforts have been deployed retrofittingexisting buildings, where the integration of wireless sensor networking technologies will open up application scenarios beyond what is commonly termed as “smart home”. Based on this experience, such platforms will be investigated in less controlled environments, such as urban or environmental applications. In this work, we introduce a dedicated service gateway. The generic overall system architecture is described briefly and particular design considerations aiming for extensibility, cost efficiency, and low power consumption are discussed. The system is designed for providing both local and centralized services. First examples ofpractical applications are described and illustrated.