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Advances in wireless communications have motivated the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for low-cost and easy-deployable physical and environmental monitoring. At the same time, the evolution of portable mobile devices is enabling novel fully integrated internetwork computing scenarios by making viable to opportunistically exploit Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) devices traversing the WSN and equipped with a WSN radio to relay part of the WSN traffic over the MANET. The paper proposes an original solution to enable reliable WSN communications between mobile MANET devices and fixed WSN sensors; the primary design guideline is to exploit a local beaconing mechanism together with low-level WSN link monitoring techniques and data retransmissions so to grant reliable communications notwithstanding MANET node mobility. The reported experimental results, collected over a real testbed, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solution, even under challenging channel contention and device mobility conditions.

Recent advances in wireless communications have motivated the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for low-cost and easy-deployable physical and environmental monitoring. WSNs were typically accessible only through special WSN nodes acting as WSN data sinks and gateways towards standard IP-based networks. The recent diffusion of low-power IP network protocol implementations has (potentially) made all WSN nodes directly reachable over IP. However, the wide variety of communication platforms makes it difficult to glue together different access types. We propose an original solution for WSN gateway-/IP-based access integration based on the primary design guideline of exploiting a proxy component to facilitate WSN access management. Our proposal is fully compliant with latest communication standards and adopts a novel (translucent) approach to enable either fully-transparent or fully-aware WSN access control. Our experimental results show good data delivery performances with different WSN access types and evaluate the cost of our management support.