Wisekit: A distributed middleware to support application-level adaptation in sensor networks

Abstract

Applications for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being spread to areas in which the contextual parameters modeling the environment are changing over the application lifespan. Whereas software adaptation has been identified as an effective approach for addressing context-aware applications, the existing work on WSNs fails to support context-awareness and mostly focuses on developing techniques to reprogram the whole sensor node rather than reconfiguring a particular portion of the sensor application software. Therefore, enabling adaptivity in the higher layers of a WSN architecture such as the middleware and application layers, beside the consideration in the lower layers, becomes of high importance. In this paper, we propose a distributed component-based middleware approach, named WiSeKit, to enable adaptation and reconfiguration of WSN applications. In particular, this proposal aims at providing an abstraction to facilitate development of adaptive WSN applications. As resource availability is the main concern of WSNs, the preliminary evaluation shows that our middleware approach promises a lightweight, fine-grained and communication-efficient model of application adaptation with a very limited memory and energy overhead. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.