Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook

In modern distributed computing, applications are rarely built directly atop operating system facilities, e.g., sockets. Higher-level middleware abstractions and systems are often employed to simplify the programmer’s chore or to achieve interoperability. In contrast, real-world wireless sensor network (WSN) applications are almost always developed by relying directly on the operating system. Why is this the case? Does it make sense to include a middleware layer in the design of WSNs? And, if so, is it the same kind of software system as in traditional distributed computing? What are the fundamental concepts, reasonable assumptions, and key criteria guiding its design? What are the main open research challenges, and the potential pitfalls? Most importantly, is it worth pursuing research in this field? This paper provides a (biased) answer to these and other research questions, preceded by a brief account on the state of the art in the field

Surfing the Internet-of-Things: lightweight access and control of wireless sensor networks using industrial low power protocols

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is emerging to play an important role in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies. To accelerate industrial application developments, the use of web services for networking applications is seen as important in IoT communications. In this paper, we present a RESTful web service architecture for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to enable remote data collection from sensor devices in WSN nodes. Specifically, we consider both IPv6 protocol support in WSN nodes as well as an integrated gateway solution to allow any Internet clients to access these nodes.We describe the implementation of a prototype system, which demonstrates the proposed RESTful approach to collect sensing data from a WSN. A performance evaluation is presented to illustrate the simplicity and efficiency of our proposed scheme

Enabling Cyber Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networking Technologies, Multiagent System Paradigm, and Natural Ecosystems

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are key components in the emergent cyber physical systems (CPSs). They may include hundreds of spatially distributed sensors which interact to solve complex tasks going beyond their individual capabilities. Due to the limited capabilities of sensors, sensor actions cannot meet CPS requirements while controlling and coordinating the operations of physical and engineered systems. To overcome these constraints, we explore the ecosystem metaphor for WSNs with the aim of taking advantage of the efficient adaptation behavior and communication mechanisms of living organisms. By mapping these organisms onto sensors and ecosystems onto WSNs, we highlight shortcomings that prevent WSNs from delivering the capabilities of ecosystems at several levels, including structure, topology, goals, communications, and functions. We then propose an agent-based architecture that migrates complex processing tasks outside the physical sensor network while incorporating missing characteristics of autonomy, intelligence, and context awareness to the WSN. Unlike existing works, we use software agents to map WSNs to natural ecosystems and enhance WSN capabilities to take advantage of bioinspired algorithms. We extend our architecture and propose a new intelligent CPS framework where several control levels are embedded in the physical system, thereby allowing agents to support WSNs technologies in enabling CPSs

Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks

MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless networks. This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples, however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability. First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical 0. Abstract 3 function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process, to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management, while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data ferries is investigated