Challenges in supporting diverse applications in a shared WSN: The Motley middleware

Accommodating multiple different applications on a single sensor node or within the same wireless sensor network (WSN) offers numerous benefits including reduced deployment cost and improved utilization of the physical substrate. This paper presents a new middleware for WSNs, called Motley. Motley, enables a shared infrastructure and multi-application support for WSNs by providing services for the dissemination, installation and scheduling of applications with diverse QoS requirements. Implementation challenges and the measures employed in Motley to overcome these as part of a shared WSN substrate are discussed. Some initial findings on the cost in terms of code loading time to support multiple applications are presented as part of this paper.