A flexible infrastructure for distributed deployment in adaptive sensor webs

Distributed sensor Webs typically operate in dynamic environments where operating conditions, transient phenomena, availability of resources, and network connection quality change frequently and unpredictably. Often these changes can neither be completely anticipated nor accurately described during development or deployment. Our prior work has described how we developed agents and services that are capable of monitoring these changing conditions and adapting system parameters using the CORBA component model (CCM) deployment infrastructure as part of the multiagent architecture for coordinated responsive observations (MACRO) platform. Our recent application of MACRO to the South East Alaska monitoring network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research (SEAMONSTER) project has identified new distributed deployment infrastructure challenges common to computationally constrained field environments in adaptive sensor Webs. These challenges include standardized execution of low-level hardware-dependent actions and on-going data tasks, automated provisioning of agents for heterogeneous field hardware, and minimizing deployment infrastructure overhead. This paper describes how we extended MACRO to address these sensor Web challenges by creating an action/effector framework standardizing the execution of lightweight actions and providing for automated provisioning of MACRO agents, in addition to footprint optimizations to the underlying CCM infrastructure.