An Architecture for a Dependable Distributed Sensor System

In future smart environments, mobile applications will find a dynamically varying number of networked sensors that offer their measurement data. This additional information supports mobile applications in operating faster, with a higher precision and enhanced safety. The potentially increased redundancy obtained in such scenarios, however, is seriously affected by additional uncertainties as well. First, the dependence on wireless communication introduces new latencies and faults, as well as errors, and second, sensors of the environment may be disturbed, of low quality, or even faulty. The quality of the collected data therefore has to be dynamically assessed. Our work aims to provide a generic programming abstraction for fault-tolerant sensors and fusion nodes that cope with varying quality of measurements and communication.