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. 2015 Mar 20;15(3):6818-44.
doi: 10.3390/s150306818.

Open hardware: a role to play in wireless sensor networks?

Roy Fisher  1   2 , Lehlogonolo Ledwaba  3 , Gerhard Hancke  4 , Carel Kruger  5   3
Affiliations

Open hardware: a role to play in wireless sensor networks?

Roy Fisher et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

The concept of the Internet of Things is rapidly becoming a reality, with many applications being deployed within industrial and consumer sectors. At the 'thing' level-devices and inter-device network communication-the core technical building blocks are generally the same as those found in wireless sensor network implementations. For the Internet of Things to continue growing, we need more plentiful resources for building intelligent devices and sensor networks. Unfortunately, current commercial devices, e.g., sensor nodes and network gateways, tend to be expensive and proprietary, which presents a barrier to entry and arguably slows down further development. There are, however, an increasing number of open embedded platforms available and also a wide selection of off-the-shelf components that can quickly and easily be built into device and network gateway solutions. The question is whether these solutions measure up to built-for-purpose devices. In the paper, we provide a comparison of existing built-for-purpose devices against open source devices. For comparison, we have also designed and rapidly prototyped a sensor node based on off-the-shelf components. We show that these devices compare favorably to built-for-purpose devices in terms of performance, power and cost. Using open platforms and off-the-shelf components would allow more developers to build intelligent devices and sensor networks, which could result in a better overall development ecosystem, lower barriers to entry and rapid growth in the number of IoT applications.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Internet of Things generic network implementation.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The rapidly prototyped Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Internet of Things node.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The CSIR Internet of Things node functional diagram.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Wireless sensor nodes' current consumption against duty cycle.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Non-traditional nodes' current consumption against duty cycle.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Comparison of processing speed against cost for WSN nodes (commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open platforms indicated in green and red, respectively).
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Throughput results when applying both confidentiality and integrity for command line application.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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