An in-field-maintenance framework for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper introduces a framework for in-field-maintenance services for wireless sensor networks. The motivation of this work is driven by an observation that many applications using wireless sensor networks require one-time deployment and will be largely unattended. It is also desirable for the applications to have a long system lifetime. However, the performance of many individual protocols and the overall performance of the system deteriorate over time. The framework we present here allows the system or each individual node in the network to identify the performance degradation, and to act to bring the system back to a desirable coherent state. We implement and apply our framework to a case study for a real system, called VigilNet [5]. The performance evaluation demonstrates that our framework is effective and efficient. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.