An approach for energy efficient service oriented architecture for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks offer an increasingly attractive method for data gathering in distributed system architectures and dynamic access via wireless connectivity. However, wireless sensor networks have limitations with respect to resources and energy consumption, which lead to increased complexity for application developers and often results in applications that are closely coupled with network protocols. One solution for de-coupling applications from the underlying protocols is to use a service-oriented Middleware. However, the limitations make the use of such an approach a challenge due to the overhead of the SOAP protocol. This overhead becomes more significant if the size of the transmitted data is small in comparison to the tagging text, causing nodes with limited power to waste valuable energy. In this paper we discuss the overhead issues associated with using SOAP in wireless sensor networks. We then present two methods for minimizing the effect of the overhead to help in the design of efficient service oriented architectures. Our study shows significant savings in transmission time and message size may be achieved which may be as high as 60% of transmission time or 75% of size in special situations.