Evolution of Software-Defined Sensor Networks

After a decade of extensive research on application-specific wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the recent development of information and communication technologies make it practical to realize new WSNs paradigm known as software-defined sensor networks (SDSNs). SDSNs are able to adapt to various application requirements and to fully explore the communication, computation and sensing resources of WSNs. Sensor nodes in SDSNs can be dynamically reprogrammed for different sensing tasks via the over-the-air-programming technique. In this paper, we introduce the concept of SDSNs and outline several pioneering related work and enabling technologies for the realization of SDSNs.