Reconfiguration in Wireless Sensor NeTworks

Wireless Sensor Networks are becoming more and more popular and offer a wide set of solutions invading our life. As the research community is working towards integrating them in the so-called “Internet of Things”, the capability to reconfigure them provides an unprecedented flexibility allowing for the flexible use of all available resources of different types. However, the desired reconfiguration features differ from use case to use case while the architecture of the device is also a restrictive factor. Full or partial reconfiguration, partial reprogramming, different reconfiguration frequencies and reprogramming of different functional components of the devices are among the available options. Since reconfiguration/reprogramming offers important benefits increasing however the complexity of the implemented logic and the network load, the design of reconfiguration applications is not a trivial task. This paper presents use cases where the reconfiguration features can be exploited, and discusses the functional blocks that can be reconfigured. We analyse as example applications the urban surveillance case based on a set of different sensors, and we identify communication modules and parameters that can be reconfigured/reprogrammed and investigate the reconfiguration frequency desired. Special emphasis is placed on the security modules and their attributes such as the key-length of the encryption algorithm.