A Java Software Stack for Resource Poor Sensor Nodes: Towards Peer-to-Peer Jini

Abstract

Sensor networks have been referred to as part of the background infrastructure required to achieve ubiquitous computing. This has recently promoted a considerable amount of attention from the research community that concluded that existing protocols and techniques for service discovery, such as JINI or UPnP are not suitable for the case of resource poor, battery-powered sensor nodes. We do not really agree with this approach. We think that those protocols could be a good starting point to "power-up" sensor nodes with poor resources for ubiquitous computing support. Starting from this principle and recognizing that existing sensor node system software is not suitable for our purpose, we decided to build a new sensor node software stack. The result was a stand-alone Java Virtual Machine, suitable for sensor nodes with poor resources, an implementation of the ubiquitous TCP/IP communication stack and Jini based middleware to achieve automatic service discover and usage. This software stack was tailored to perfectly fit in the state-of-the-art Mica2 class of sensor nodes.