Developing a WSN internet gateway for an African context

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining popularity in the industrial and academic communities as an unobtrusive and low power alternative solution to gather data from an everincreasing variety of environments and phenomena. This paper focuses on the development of a configurable, low power and cost-effective gateway based on an ARM9 microprocessor to link a WSN to the internet through the GSM network or an ethernet connection. A bespoke application written in Visual C# executed by Windows Embedded CE and a configurable hardware platform permit the functionality of the gateway to be adapted to the requirements of a WSN deployment. The gateway may be configured remotely and provides the WSN with persistent data storage and frequent data uploads to a file server via the internet. This study has been successful in the development of a generic gateway which was found to be more configurable and cost effective than previous gateway implementations.