Description

Wireless sensor networks represent a disruptive technology likely to have a great impact on both society and research throughout this decade. Programming sensor networks is a difficult and error prone task as they often exhibit continuous reconfiguration caused by environmental factors and energy depletion, the introduction of new sensors, and the presence of various forms of mobility internal and external to the network. This project is developing a flexible software infrastructure that allows the programmer to treat the sensor network as a shared, evolving, geographically distributed, general-purpose computing milieu. This infrastructure achieves an unprecedented level of flexibility, fluidity, and adaptability by structuring applications in terms of a community of coordinating mobile agents. Agents are able to enter and exit the sensor network and to construct and evolve complex applications by exploiting new forms of code and state mobility and dynamic composition. They are able to maintain the integrity of the application and its relation to the physical environment being monitored by exploiting new coordination techniques that include a spatiotemporal dimension. A distinguishing feature of the proposed software infrastructure is its unified treatment of all forms of mobility encountered in sensor network applications: movement of entities in the physical environment, movement of the user, movement of code within the network and across network boundaries, and even the movement of sensors making up the network. This project is creating the very first agent-based, software infrastructure for the development of flexible sensor network applications. It allows programmers to design applications that can be deployed when needed and as needed, can share network resources, can limit their network usage only to regions of interest, can adapt to network and environmental conditions, and can reduce energy consumption.

This research was made possible by NSF Grant CNS-0520220. It was conducted within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

Projects

The following research projects were made possible by this grant.

• Agilla
• Agimone
• Multi-resolution Location Directory Service (MLDS)
• Servilla
• Utility-based Multi-Application Deployment Environment (UMADE)

People

The following are the researchers supported by this grant.

• Gruia-Catalin Roman (PI)
• Chenyang Lu
• Chien-Liang Fok
• Sangeeta Bhattacharya

Publications

• Fok, C.-L., Roman, G.-C., Lu, C., Coordinating Resource Usage through Adaptive Service Provisioning in Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination 2010), Clarke, D., Agha, G., (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6116, Springer-Verlag, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2010, pp. 107-121.
  
  
• Fok, C.-L., Roman, G.-C., Lu, C., Enhanced Coordination in Sensor Networks through Flexible Service Provisioning, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination 2009), Field, J., Vasconcelos, V., (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5521, Springer-Verlag, Lisbon, Portugal, June 2009, pp. 66-85.
  
  
• Bhattacharya, S., Saifullah, A., Lu, C., Roman, G.-C., Multi-Application Deployment in Integrated Sensing Systems Based on Quality of Monitoring, Technical Report WUCSE-2008-17, Washington University in St. Louis, 2008. (under review)
  
  
• Fok, C.-L., Roman, G.-C., Lu, C., Rapid Development and Flexible Deployment of Adaptive Wireless Sensor Network Applications, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'05), Columbus, Ohio, June 6-10, 2005, pp. 653-662. One of 5 papers nominated for Best Paper Award (543 papers submitted)
  
  
• Fok, C.-L., Roman, G.-C., Lu, C., Mobile Agent Middleware for Sensor Networks: An Application Case Study, In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'05), Los Angeles, California, April 25-27, 2005, pp. 382-387.
  
  
• Hackmann, G., Fok, C.-L., Roman, G.-C., Lu, C., Agimone: Middleware Support for Seamless Integration of Sensor and IP Networks, Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '06)
  
  
• Bhattacharya, S, Atay, N., Alankus, G., Lu, C., Bayazit, B., and Roman, G.-C., Roadmap Query for Sensor Network Assisted Navigation in Dynamic Environments, Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '06). Best Paper Award!
  
  
• Massaguer, D., Fok, C.-L., Venkatasubramanian, N., Roman, G.-C., and Lu, C., Exploring Sensor Networks using Mobile Agents, International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS'06), May 2006, pp. 323-325.
  
  
• Bhattacharya, S., Fok, C.-L., Lu, C., and Roman, G.-C., Design and Implementation of a Flexible Location Directory Service for Tiered Sensor Networks, In the proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '07)