Sensor Information Networking Architecture

The advent of technology has facilitated the development of networked systems of extremely small, low-power devices that combine programmable general-purpose computing with multiple sensing and wireless communication capability. This networked system of programmable sensor nodes, which together form a sensor network, poses unique challenges on how information collected by, and stored within, the sensor network could be queried and accessed, and how concurrent sensing tasks could be executed internally and programmed by external users. In this paper, we describe SINA (Sensor Information Networking Architecture), which facilitates the querying, monitoring and tasking of sensor networks. We model a sensor network as a collection of massively distributed objects, and SINA plays the role of middleware that facilitates the adaptive organization of sensor information. The SINA kernel provides a set of configuration and communication primitives that enable the scalable, robust and energy-efficient organization of, and interactions among, sensor objects. On top of the SINA kernel is a programmable substrate that follows the spreadsheet paradigm and provides mechanisms to create associations among sensor nodes. Users then access information within a sensor network using declarative queries and perform tasks using programmable scripts. Issues concerning interworking between stationary sensor networks and mobile nodes are also addressed.