Towards an autonomic peer-to-peer middleware for wireless sensor networks

In this paper the authors present an approach for the design of a wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture and the corresponding middleware. The middleware, with the main functions service discovery and task management, interacts with the WSN and allows an efficient collaboration of the services on top. Design criteria for a WSN architecture and the middleware are scalability, fault-tolerance and self-organization. To meet these requirements it is necessary to minimize the need for communication of a single sensor node and to distribute the functionality of a node with respect to its properties autonomously. Therefore, the system approach envisions a four layer model for the sensor network and its middleware: Two layers of sensor nodes, one layer of gateway peers and one layer of process peers. The middleware's communication model is based on a peer-to-peer approach to reduce communication complexity. Important aspects of the system are already implemented and evaluated with respect to energy consumption and message complexity.