Starfish: policy driven self-management in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are a key aspect of many pervasive systems designed to aid people in their normal activities and adapt to their current context. However, these systems also need to be self-managing in discovering and configuring devices for services, detecting and responding to attacks, determining errors and faults and reconfiguring the system to mitigate these. In this paper we describe the Starfish framework for specifying and dynamically managing policies in sensor nodes. We discuss the components in the framework which include the Finger2 policy system for specifying dynamic adaptivity, a module library to simplify the programming the basic funtionality of nodes and a client side editor for managing policies. We describe policies for an adaptive healthcare body network then focus on policies for self-healing aspects of sensor networks and give examples of policy-based reconfigurations to deal with faults.