A Retasking Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in scientific research, industrial manufacturing, and environmental monitoring over the past decade. Using pre-existing networks to assist in responding to disaster events can be cost-effective. In this paper, we present Alert, a software framework for re tasking wireless sensor networks, enabling these networks to respond rapidly to unexpected events without neglecting their originally assigned tasks. Alert, built upon Deluge [1], is a wireless network code distribution protocol enabling node group management, selective node and group reprogramming, and network state monitoring. We used a test bed of 25 Tmote Sky nodes to evaluate the reprogramming performance and space overhead of Alert under different network sizes and densities.