A three-tier middleware architecture supporting bidirectional location tracking of numerous mobile nodes under legacy WSN environment

Dong Kyu Lee, Tae Hyon Kim, Seol Young Jeong, Soon Ju Kang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the mobile asset management services applicable to warehouse, hospital, etc. a low-cost and practical bidirectional location tracking of mobile asset is one of the most important technical issue must be solved. Due to the complexity and heavy traffic of the legacy location-awareness techniques, simultaneous locationing and tracking of numerous mobile nodes in real-time is not easy. To address this problem, we propose the three-tier middleware architecture called uMATI (ubiquitous Mobile Asset Tracking Infra). In the uMATI, all nodes (stationary and mobile) commonly use the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol to guarantee the compatibility with the legacy wireless sensor network (WSN) despite of mobile-stationary nodes co-existence network. To solve the bidirectional tracking in spite of the free mobility of the numerous mobile nodes, we firstly suggest a simple bidirectional location protocol called BLIDx (bidirectional location ID exchange) and its implementation into both the mobile and stationary nodes. In addition, to prevent the traffic overflow due to the concentration of excessive mobile nodes into a single location, we propose adding a specially designed stationary node called virtual sink (VS) node and installing related middleware components into the node. Results from the experimental evaluation prove that the proposed architecture enhanced the practicability by effectively supporting the mobility and managing the traffic in the real-time mobile asset tracking applications.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)735-748
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Systems Architecture
Volume57
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2011

Keywords

  • Bidirectional mobile asset tracking
  • Middleware of wireless sensor network
  • Mobile-stationary co-existence WSN
  • Real-time location system

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