Management of Wireless Sensor Networks Using TCP/IP

To allow remote management of heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the WSNs should be connected to the Internet. To overcome this problem, the authors propose a communication infrastructure, which includes a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) operating as a backbone network. In order to realize such interconnection between the WSN and an external network without any proxies or middle-boxes, they propose to use TCP/IP as the standard protocol for all network entities, e.g., for configuration and uploading application code to the sensor nodes. They present a cross layer designed communication architecture which contains a MAC protocol, TCP/IP, and a protocol called TCP Support for Sensor Nodes (TSS).