Supporting platform for heterogeneous sensor network operation based on unmanned vehicles systems and wireless sensor nodes

Advances in vehicle intelligence technology is enabling the development of systems composed of unmanned vehicles, which are able to interact with devices spread on the environment in order to take decisions related to their movements. Sensor networks represent an area that can profit a lot of this new possibilities, as autonomous vehicles can be used to carry sensor devices, which interacting with static sensor nodes can enhance the results provided by the overall system. However, some problems arise in applications´ development in such systems due to the network nodes heterogeneity, and also the dynamicity of the environment in which they are deployed, which changes constantly. Thus, new platform solutions are necessary to handle the heterogeneous nodes capabilities in order to facilitate coordination and integration among them. This paper proposes a supporting infrastructure to address these problems composed of an adaptive middleware and a customizable sensor node platform. The goal is to support cooperation in heterogeneous sensor networks, which are composed by static and mobile nodes with different capabilities. The middleware adapts itself in order to manage the very distinct computing resources of the nodes, and also changes in the environment and in the application demands. The customizable sensor node platform allows optimizations in hw/sw modules to meet specific application requirements, allowing the creation of low-end and resource rich nodes that work in an integrated network. In order to illustrate the proposed approach, a system for military surveillance applications is presented as case study.