A Survey of System Software for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly used as an enabling technology in a variety of domains. They operate unattended in an autonomous way, are inherently error prone and have limited resources like energy and bandwidth. Due to these special features and constraints, the management of sensor nodes in WSNs has its own unique technical challenges as well. For example, system software for WSNs needs to be specially tailored and additionally support specific quality of service (QoS) properties such as context-awareness, application-knowledge, reconfiguration, QoS-awareness, scalability and efficiency. A proper classification and comparison of notable system software for WSNs seems to be in order for the literature on this subject. In doing so, in this paper we try to present a survey on such system software with the objective of classifying them especially with regard to aforementioned QoS considerations in the middleware layer. Some classes are identified: agent-based, service-based, query-based, and event-based ones.