Reconfigurable Wireless Sensor Networks new adaptive dynamic solutions for flexible architectures

This paper deals with reconfigurable wireless sensor networks RWSN that should be adapted to their environment under user and energy constraints. A RWSN is assumed to be composed of a set of communicating nodes such that each one executes reconfigurable software tasks to control local sensors. We propose three reconfiguration forms to adapt a RWSN: (a) software reconfiguration allowing the addition/ removal/ update of tasks, (b) hardware reconfiguration allowing the activation/deactivation of nodes, (c) protocol reconfiguration allowing the modification of routing protocols between nodes. We propose a zone-based multi-agent architecture for RWSN where a communication protocol is well-defined to optimize distributed reconfigurations. Each agent of this architecture is modeled by nested state machines in order to control the problem complexity. The paper´s contribution is applied to a case study that we simulate to show the originality of this new architecture.