An architectural model to support adaptive software systems for sensor networks

Major characteristics of sensor networks, such as node mobility, collaboration among heterogeneous sensors, and environmental changes, require flexible and adaptive software systems. It is also essential to have a mechanism to describe configurations of distributed components and to coordinate the sensors in the network through the configuration information. In this paper, we show how an architectural model can be used to support adaptive software systems for sensor networks. This work is based on our previous work of using an architecture description language (ADL) to represent configurations of software components in sensor nodes and to reconfigure them in response to changing needs of users. We use XML as a means to exchange and manipulate ADL descriptions. To demonstrate how the architecture-based adaptation works for sensor networks, we simulated a scenario of reconfiguring a sensor network to handle node failures.