Sensor Information Networking Architecture

Chien-Chung Shen
Computer and Information Sciences,
University of Delaware

2:00pm Friday May 12, 2000
Lecture Hall III, Administration Building

The advent of technology has facilitated the development of networked systems of extremely small, low power devices that combine programmable general purpose computing with multiple sensing and wireless communication capability. This networked system of programmable sensor nodes, together form a sensor network, poses unique challenges on how information collected by and stored within sensor networks should be accessed, how concurrent sensing tasks should be programmed by external users, and how sensor network themselves could be monitored and diagnosed. In this talk, I will describe a sensor information networking architecture, called SINA, that facilitates querying and tasking of sensor networks. We model a sensor network as a collection of massively distributed objects, and SINA plays the role of a middleware that facilitates adaptive organization of sensor information. On top the SINA kernel is a programmable substrate that follows the spreadsheet paradigm and provides mechanisms for querying and tasking of sensor nodes. Issues and approaches concerning diagnosis of sensor networks will also be described.