Implementing Business Rules on Sensor Nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be able to assist industrial and business processes and to render rich functionality in a dependable way. Two key elements that can make this real are: a simple and efficient way of expressing the business logic, and a reliable mechanism for selectively reconfiguring sensor nodes. We present a solution that combines both elements. The main objective is to guarantee the dissemination of business rules to multicast groups of sensor nodes, while striving for energy efficiency and low overhead. Simple cross-layer optimizations are used to achieve this. For scalability reasons, our solution demands only local knowledge, performs local retransmission of lost packets and uses aggregation of acknowledgements. The results of our evaluation indicate a good ability of recovering from serious errors, even under high error rates.