A redundant gateway prototype for wireless avionic sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies provide advantages that allow them to replace traditional wired systems in an ever growing number of applications. This paper describes the design of a WSN for mission critical applications such as the case of avionics, in which data collected from the sensors can be delivered to a cloud application through multiple independent gateways, thereby increasing data availability in presence of failures. Since the same data might be distributed along multiple paths, system-wide synchronization must be provided in order to guarantee data consistency. A heartbeat protocol is introduced along each path in order to guarantee timely detection of any single failure. We present a solution that can be implemented using open source software and commercial off-the-shelf hardware, which makes this approach viable for networks with a large number of heterogeneous sensors. Results reported in this paper show some sample measurements as well as the performance evaluation for our heartbeat algorithm in terms of latency between a failure and a full recovery of the system.