An architecture for seamless configuration, deployment, and management of wireless sensor-actuator networks

Abstract

The goal of this work is to provide (non-specialist) users with the means to seamlessly setup and monitor a Wireless Sensor-Actuator Network (WSN) without writing any code or performing subtle hardware configurations. Towards this goal, we present an architecture that allows the seamless configuration, deployment and management of applications over WSN. We explore the fact that most deployments have a common modus operandi: (a) simple data readers running on the nodes periodically gather and send data to sinks, and; (b) sinks process incoming data and, accordingly, issue actuation commands to the nodes. We argue that, given the knowledge of a platform's capabilities, its sensors and actuators and their respective programming interfaces, it is possible to fully automate the process of configuring, building, and deploying an application over a WSN. Similarly, monitoring and managing the deployment can be vastly simplified by using a middleware that supports user defined tasks that process data from the nodes, divide the WSN into regions, defined by simple boolean predicates over data, and eventually issue actuation commands on regions.