Design And Implementation Of The Embedded Internet-based IP Sensor

With the improvement of Internet and sensor techniques, it is an important tendency to combine the smart transducer technology with the Internet technology to develop the next generation of sensors, which enables the sensors to own the ability of TCP/IP-based communication at the device level. That is a significant step towards building telemonitoring network based on the present Internet infrastructure. After a careful discussion of the smart transducer standard, i.e. IEEE 1451 Standard, this dissertation presents an Internet-enabled smart transducer model, i.e. an IP Sensor model, and realizes its full working prototype. Moreover, several experiments are designed to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed solution. The main contributions of the dissertation are:First of all, after a careful investigation, the concept of an IP sensor is put forward combined with the embedded Internet technology. Then, the IP Sensor model is presented, as well as its working mechanism is explained, after a detailed analysis and discussion of the IEEE1451 family Standards, especially 1451.1 and 1451.2. Herein, the proposed IP sensor model is made up of two parts: including namely Internet-enabled Application Processing Module (IAPM) and Smart Transducer Interface Module (STIM). The IAPM implements the TCP/IP stack and an embedded web server, and provides the standard user interface based on web browsers, which make the IP sensor Internet visible and capable. The STIM is full compliant with IEEE 1451.2 standard and includes some specific transducers, Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS), addressing logic, etc. It owns the functions to acquire data and other abilities, for instance self-description. Cooperating with each other through a transducer interface, the two parts aforementioned realize the functions of the proposed IP Sensor. Moreover, a full working prototype, based on single chips, is implemented in agreement with the proposed IP Sensor model, including the design and implementation of the hardware, the TCP/IP stack, the application programming interfaces and relevant configuration tools. Several issues related to the implementation of the TCP/IP stack, the embedded web server and data correction engine are discussed in detail.Finally, some experiments are made to verify the functions of the proposed IP Sensor. The results experimentally show that the proposed IP sensor is feasible and suitable for Internet-based applications, especially for the non-critical real-time applications such as remote monitoring. Excellent performances of the proposed IP sensor are also obtained.