Virtual Full Replication for Scalable and Adaptive Real-Time Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have limited resources and often support large-scale applications that need scalable propagation of sensor data to users. We propose a white-board style of communication in sensor networks using a distributed real-time database supporting Virtual Full Replication with Adaptive Segmentation. This allows mobile client nodes to access, transparently and efficiently, any sensor data at any node in the network. We present a two-tiered wireless architecture, and an adaptation protocol, for scalable and adaptive white-board communication in large-scale sensor networks. Sensor value readings at nodes of the sensor tier are published at nodes of the database tier as database updates to objects in a distributed real-time database. The search space of client nodes for sensor data is thus limited to the number of database nodes. With this scheme, we can show scalable resource usage and short adaptation times for several hundreds of database nodes and up to 50 moving clients.