Welcome to Coventry University website

Team: Dan Goldsmith, Dr James Brusey , Dr James Shuttleworth, Dr Elena Gaura.

The aim of this work is to remove significant roadblocks to wider adoption of WSN technology by producing a unified architectural framework for the development of WSNs dedicated to a given class of applications, such as monitoring applications. The architectural framework will facilitate the practical high-level deployment, maintenance and development of WSNs.

The objectives of the research are as follows:

• To design and evaluate a generic sensor network architecture for monitoring-type WSN applications based upon the experience gained from reviewing the domain literature and the staged deployment of a WSN Testbed.
• To encapsulate the core functionality of WSN monitoring applications into the architectural framework, thus enabling “plug and play” development for common WSN deployment patterns.
• To develop and deploy several monitoring applications using the architectural framework.
• (Services, such as collaborative information extraction and information visualisation will be incorporated).
• To perform an evaluation of the proposed sensor network architecture, against results found within the domain literature.

To achieve this, the work addresses the following research questions:

• Since many WSN applications exist, often with overlapping functionality requirements, what is the core functionality required within most WSN monitoring applications?
• Are there a set of design patterns that can be used to structure these functional requirements?
• If so, can we reduce and refactor the core functional requirements to a set of useful functional abstractions, with the aim of providing a generic interface to common sensing and hardware tasks?
• Given the wide range of WSN applications, can a fixed API enable applications to be developed without low-level hardware access? If low-level access is required, how can it be provided whilst still retaining the advantages of the architectural framework?
• How can the final architecture be implemented, to address the traditional WSN concerns of overhead, size, and energy constraints?

The work is currently running alongside the development of the Cogent WSN Testbed. Each stage of development of the architectural framework will coincide with an incremental increase in the capability of the Testbed, using the challenges discovered to drive the requirements for the software systems.

By taking a cyclical approach to development / deployment, the project benefits from a clear set of both design requirements and testing plans. This allows the scope of the framework to be modified to take into account new advances in the fast moving field of WSN research. By implementing “real-world” WSN applications at each milestone, the results from each stage of experimentation can be compared to those in the literature, allowing evaluation of the architectural framework.

Two abstraction layers have been developed and evaluated to date: a sensing abstraction layer and a sending abstraction layer. Both have been deployed and tested on a network of 5 nodes with sensors (temperature and sound).

For details of ongoing work go to Dan's PhD project page.