Senceive: A Middleware for a Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A significant amount of research effort is being carried out by the research community to increase the scope and usefulness of wireless sensor networks; to optimise life time by developing energy efficient power management, self-organising, medium access and routing protocols; and to reduce the cost of sensing nodes so that dense and robust deployment is possible. Though much has already been achieved, currently the cost of commercially available wireless sensor nodes is considerable and the wide applicability of proposed or existing protocols is still under investigation. One essential problem associated with cost or wide applicability of protocols is that sensor networks are application-specific. Protocols and in-network algorithms are optimised for particular sensing tasks. On the other hand, in research environments researchers would like to experiment not with a single application but with many applications. Considering the not-so-cheap sensing nodes available on the market and the management overhead of deploying wireless sensor networks, it is not economical or efficient to dedicate wireless sensor networks just to a single application, not at present at any rate. We therefore propose a middleware that enables researchers to experiment with multiple applications while providing them with essential in-network functionalities to satisfy individual application's requirements. The middleware cleanly separates sensing from network management so that application developers can obtain data from the wireless sensor networks without having to deal with management concerns.