Supporting Preemptive Multitasking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Supporting the concurrent execution of multiple tasks on lightweight sensor nodes could enable the deployment of independent applications on a shared wireless sensor network, thus saving cost and time by exploiting infrastructures which are typically underutilized if dedicated to a single task. Existing approaches to wireless sensor network programming provide limited support to concurrency at the cost of reducing the generality and the expressiveness of the language adopted. This paper presents a java-compatible platform for wireless sensor networks which provides a thorough support to preemptive multitasking while allowing the programmers to write their applications in java. The proposed approach has been implemented and tested on top of VirtualSense, an ultra-low-power wireless sensor mote providing a java-compatible runtime environment. Performance and scalability of the solution are discussed in light of extensive experiments performed on representative benchmarks

A component-based model and language for wireless sensor network applications

Wireless sensor networks are often used by experts in many different fields to gather data pertinent to their work. Although their expertise may not include software engineering, these users are expected to produce low-level software for a concurrent, real-time and resource-constrained computing environment. In this paper, we introduce a component-based model for wireless sensor network applications and a language, Insense, for supporting the model. An application is modelled as a composition of interacting components and the application model is preserved in the Insense implementation where active components communicate via typed channels. The primary design criteria for Insense include: to abstract over low-level concerns for ease of programming; to permit worst-case space and time usage of programs to be determinable; to support the fractal composition of components whilst eliminating implicit dependencies between them; and, to facilitate the construction of low footprint programs suitable for resource-constrained devices. This paper presents an overview of the component model and Insense, and demonstrates how they meet the above criteria.Preprin

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

Not All Wireless Sensor Networks Are Created Equal: A Comparative Study On Tunnels

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisioned for a number of application scenarios. Nevertheless, the few in-the-field experiences typically focus on the features of a specific system, and rarely report about the characteristics of the target environment, especially w.r.t. the behavior and performance of low-power wireless communication. The TRITon project, funded by our local administration, aims to improve safety and reduce maintenance costs of road tunnels, using a WSN-based control infrastructure. The access to real tunnels within TRITon gives us the opportunity to experimentally assess the peculiarities of this environment, hitherto not investigated in the WSN field. We report about three deployments: i) an operational road tunnel, enabling us to assess the impact of vehicular traffic; ii) a non-operational tunnel, providing insights into analogous scenarios (e.g., underground mines) without vehicles; iii) a vineyard, serving as a baseline representative of the existing literature. Our setup, replicated in each deployment, uses mainstream WSN hardware, and popular MAC and routing protocols. We analyze and compare the deployments w.r.t. reliability, stability, and asymmetry of links, the accuracy of link quality estimators, and the impact of these aspects on MAC and routing layers. Our analysis shows that a number of criteria commonly used in the design of WSN protocols do not hold in tunnels. Therefore, our results are useful for designing networking solutions operating efficiently in similar environments

Extending sensor networks into the cloud using Amazon web services

Sensor networks provide a method of collecting environmental data for use in a variety of distributed applications. However, to date, limited support has been provided for the development of integrated environmental monitoring and modeling applications. Specifically, environmental dynamism makes it difficult to provide computational resources that are sufficient to deal with changing environmental conditions. This paper argues that the Cloud Computing model is a good fit with the dynamic computational requirements of environmental monitoring and modeling. We demonstrate that Amazon EC2 can meet the dynamic computational needs of environmental applications. We also demonstrate that EC2 can be integrated with existing sensor network technologies to offer an end-to-end environmental monitoring and modeling solution

Design of a WSN Platform for Long-Term Environmental Monitoring for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a virtual view, via the Internet Protocol, to a huge variety of real life objects, ranging from a car, to a teacup, to a building, to trees in a forest. Its appeal is the ubiquitous generalized access to the status and location of any "thing" we may be interested in. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well suited for long-term environmental data acquisition for IoT representation. This paper presents the functional design and implementation of a complete WSN platform that can be used for a range of long-term environmental monitoring IoT applications. The application requirements for low cost, high number of sensors, fast deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance, and high quality of service are considered in the specification and design of the platform and of all its components. Low-effort platform reuse is also considered starting from the specifications and at all design levels for a wide array of related monitoring application

An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figure