An entity maintenance and connection service for sensor networks

In this paper, we present a middleware architecture for coordination services in sensor networks that facilitates interaction between groups of sensors which monitor different environmental events. It sits on top of the native routing infrastructure and exports the abstraction of mobile communication endpoints maintained at the locations of such events. A single logical destination is created and maintained for every environmental event of interest. Such destinations are uniquely labeled and can be used for communication by application-level algorithms for coordination and sensory data management between the different event locales. For example, they may facilitate coordination, in a distributed intrusion scenario, among nodes in the vicinity of the intruders. We evaluate our middleware architecture using GloMoSim, a wireless network simulator. Our results illustrate the success of our architecture in maintaining event-related communication endpoints. We provide an analysis of how architectural and network dependent parameters affect our performance. Additionally we provide a proof of concept implementation on a real sensor network testbed (Berkeley's MICA Motes).