Abstract
This paper presents the NTP experimental platform for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSN), which is built on the campus of National Tsing Hua University under the support of the National Science and Technology Program for Telecommunications (NTP) in Taiwan. The unique purpose of this testbed is to provide an open platform for research communities to test and to showcase their WSN systems and applications. The heterogeneous testbed is composed of three different sensor platforms: the III Zigbee Advanced Platform, the ITRI Sensor Platform and the Moteiv Tmote Platform. A middleware architecture is developed to support context-aware services (CASs) and location-based services (LBSs) across different sensor platforms. Specifically, a SENSORINFO gateway is implemented to hide the discrepancy of different sensor platforms from application developers, which allows application developers to deploy their CASs and/or LBSs while being oblivious to the underlying sensor hardware or system architecture. Moreover, to facilitate the experiments, an over-the-air (OTA) remote update function is available on the platform to enable reprogramming of sensors from a remote location. To demonstrate the unique features of this platform, we present two sample applications: the People Tracking System and the Green Building Monitoring System, which are examples of the LBS and the CAS, respectively.