A vision for Wireless Sensor Networks: Hybrid architecture, model framework and service based systems

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), are a challenging and evolving area where applications can demand services, distribution, modularity and intelligence. WSNs are a versatile field with varying software architectures, which has led to the development of a plethora of WSN middlewares, management and reconfiguration protocols. To realize the potential of evolving WSN technologies and software architectures we need to move away from traditional approaches towards an adaptable service oriented hybrid architecture, which should ideally run on the plate for wireless sensor devices, to minimize redundant protocol stack overhead. The middleware should provide distributed machine to machine communication and implementation level model driven architectures should describe how the WSN works at each level of the network. This paper presents compelling arguments for this vision of future WSNs and demonstrates how some of these concepts have been implemented on a significantly large physical WSN in NIMBUS Center of Embedded Systems Research Cork Ireland. Furthermore the paper gives an overview of implementation of the hybrid native architecture (HNA) on sensor devices and its collaborative functionality with a model based Open Framework Middleware (OFM) for WSN.