USink: Smartphone-based moible sink for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a cross-platform solution of smartphone-based mobile sink for wireless sensor networks, named uSink. With a cross-platform SD card, named uSD card, any smartphone with SD interface can be empowered with the capability to communicate with wireless sensor nodes. Furthermore, a middleware on mobile phone, named uSinkWare, is also designed to provide a typical mobile sink's functionalities, including sensor detection, topology monitoring, routing, sensor data collection and sensor control, etc. Thanks to Qt, uSinkWare can also work on many popular mobile platforms, such as Symbian, Maemo, Windows mobile and embedded Linux. uSink has been implemented, and its performance has been verified by experiments. The experiment results show that current high-end smartphones have enough capabilities to work as mobile sinks, and uSink can be regarded as an attempt on this aspect. © 2011 IEEE.