SWARMS: A Sensornet Wide Area Remote Management System

Our experiences deploying a wide area wireless sensor network (WSN) in the wildfires of Idaho motivate the need for a software middleware system capable of remotely managing many sensor nodes deployed in widely disparate geographic regions. This requirement is unlike the localized focus of many traditional WSN middleware systems, which manage a group of sensor nodes deployed in a single small region, e.g. a warehouse or lab. We describe in this paper SWARMS, a wide area sensor network management system. The SWARMS architecture is designed for scalability and flexibility, while providing an infrastructure to manage in situ sensor nodes, e.g. upload code images, retrieve diagnostics, etc. To demonstrate its flexibility, we present two deployments of SWARMS, the first in a wide area weather sensor network, and the second in a local area testbed that was used by a class of graduate students. To demonstrate its scalability, we analyze the performance of SWARMS when the middleware is subject to sensor data loads of thousands of packets per second.