iPhone enable wireless sensor network

Abstract

As the growing tendency of information digitalization, sensor network, widely used in information collection, is playing a more important role. Therefore, more attentions have been paid into the infrastructure of sensor network. These research works include the sensor interface, processing unit, communication unit and monitor unit. Meanwhile, among all the key elements of establishing a sensor network, the monitor unit plays a crucial role. As an element of the system that is used to observe the data, monitor is traditionally embedded in the system of a computer. Although embedding the monitor into the system of a computer have an advantage over data sharing, the immobility of a computer still limits the applications of such wireless sensor network. Smart Phone as a newly invented product has already been taking the place of traditional mobile phone in the recent years. Smart phone not only inherits the advantage of computers’ easy data sharing, but also has superiority in the mobility. Therefore, it is desirable to transplant the monitor element of a sensor system into a smart phone. Among all kinds of smart phone, IPhone has one of the biggest shares of the market. Moreover, considering its well-organized online App store and the magnificent users’ experience it provides, this thesis chooses IPhone as the monitor unit of the wireless sensor network. The primer objective of this thesis is to establish a wireless sensor network whose monitor element is an IPhone. This wireless sensor network could be manipulated as a platform where any kinds of sensors fitting the certain working requirement, such as the voltage, can be uploaded. Meanwhile, the wireless sensor network also allows two working conditions, global mode when a large number of sensor nodes are expected to be composed the network, and locally when the Internet access is unavailable. To this end, an IPhone enable wireless sensor network is developed in this research project. The network is composed of a sensor, a MCU (Micro-programmed Control Unit), a Wireless Communication Unit and a Monitor Unit.