Support for reliability in self-organizing sensor networks

As wireless sensor networks are becoming increasingly common, distributed embedded applications will exploit these sensor networks not only for information dissemination, but also for in-network processing and other distributed computation, such as sensor fusion, classification, and collaborative target tracking. However, sensor nodes are prone to failure, insufficient energy supply, high error rate, and mobility. Three main distributed services are important for maintaining reliability in distributed sensor network, in spite of these failures - distributed lookup services, composition service and dynamic adaptation service. In particular, the dynamic adaptation service collaborates with the distributed lookup service to monitor failures in the sensor nodes and manages the correct schedule of procedures for recovering from the failure. Developers may define their own detection algorithms for other changes, including available services in the sensor network, migration of sensor nodes, and changes in task and network requirements. The procedures for maintaining the level of reliability required for the application are specified by the application programmers. These distributed services execute over a diffusion network layer that alleviate some of the problems of mobility, disconnection, dynamic reconfiguration, and limited power.