LooCI: The Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure

Abstract

Creating and managing applications for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is complicated by large scale, resource constraints and network dynamics. Reconfigurable component models minimize these complexities throughout the application lifecycle. However, contemporary component based middleware for WSNs is limited by its poor support for distribution. This paper introduces the Loosely-coupled Component Infrastructure (LooCI), a middleware for building distributed component-based WSN applications. LooCI advances the state-of-the-art by cleanly separating distributed concerns from component implementation, supporting application-level interoperability between heterogeneous WSN platforms and providing compatibility testing of bindings at runtime. Together, these features promote the safe and efficient composition and reconfiguration of distributed WSN applications. We evaluate the performance of LooCI on three classes of sensor nodes and demonstrate that these features can be provided with minimal overhead in terms of computation, memory and message passing.