A framework for efficient and programmable sensor networks

Ad hoc wireless networks of deeply embedded devices such as micro-sensors and microactuators have emerged as one of the key growth areas for wireless networking and computing technologies. So far these networks/systems have been designed with static and custom architectures for specific tasks, thus providing inflexible operation and interaction capabilities. Various architectures are currently trying to make sensor networks programmable and open to transient users. Most of these schemes though, promote algorithms that are too centralized and/or too interactive (i.e. the user is involved in the control loop most of the time), losing the efficiency these highly resource-limited systems need. Our approach employs active networking concepts in the form of lightweight and mobile control scripts that allow the computation, communication, and sensing resources at the sensor nodes to be efficiently harnessed in an application-specific fashion. The replication/migration of such scripts in several sensor nodes allows the dynamic deployment of distributed algorithms into the network. Although these mobile control scripts have similarities to mobile agents for traditional data networks, a framework to support them has different considerations than its traditional data network counterpart. The paper discusses these considerations and design choices, and describes SensorWare, our implementation of such a framework.