Towards enterprise applications using wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have become a hot issue in research, and significant progress has been achieved in the past few years. Recently, the topic has gained lot of momentum and has become increasingly attractive for industry paving the way for new applications of sensor networks which go well beyond traditional sensor applications. Sensor Networks is seen as one of the most promising technologies that will bridge the physical and virtual worlds enabling them to interact. Expectations go beyond the research visions, towards deployment in real-world applications that would empower business processes and future business cases. In this paper we look at WSNs from the business software perspective, including business model, service-oriented architecture, integration with enterprise software systems as well as benefits and lessons learned. As an example use-case we demonstrate the use of WSNs for hazardous goods management in the chemical industry. Finally, based on our experiences we depict some directions that can be followed in order to pave the road to real business applications for WSNs.