A Message-Oriented Middleware for Sensor Networks
Eduardo Souto, Germano Guimarães, Glauco Vasconcelos,
Mardoqueu Vieira, Nelson Rosa, Carlos Ferraz
Federal University of Pernambuco, Informatic Center
Av. Professor Luis Freire
Cidade Universitaria 50740-540 Recife PE
+55 81 2126-8430
{ejps, gfg, gpv, msv, nsr, cagf}@cin.ufpe.br
ABSTRACT
The miniaturization of hardware components has lead to the
development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and
networked-applications over them. Meanwhile, middleware
systems have also been proposed in order to both facilitating the
development of these applications and providing common
application services. The development of middleware for sensor
networks, however, places new challenges to middleware
developers due to the low availability of resources and processing
capacity of the sensor nodes. In this context, this paper presents a
middleware for WSN named Mires. Mires incorporates
characteristics of message-oriented middleware by allowing
applications communicate in a publish/subscribe way. In order to
illustrate the proposed middleware, we implement an aggregation
middleware service for an environment-monitoring application.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed
Systems.
General Terms
Design, Experimentation.
Keywords
Wireless sensor networks, middleware, publish/subscribe.
1. INTRODUCTION
The continuous miniaturization of the hardware components and
the evolution of wireless communication technologies have
stimulated the development and use of Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSN) in the monitoring of physical environments. Typically, a
network is formed by hundreds to thousands of sensor nodes, low
power devices equipped with one or more sensors. Sensor nodes
are responsible for collecting environmental information and
sending it towards a sink node, which receives the information
gathered by the network and delivers it to the final user.
These networks have been developed for a wide range of
applications, such as habitat monitoring, object tracking, precision
agriculture, building monitoring and military systems [1], [2], [3].
Common to these applications is the need of continuously
collecting and integrating data coming from a large number of
sensor nodes. Hence, a basic issue is how to satisfy applications’
requirements considering specific characteristics of sensor
networks such as constrained sensor power and network
bandwidth.
In this way, most research efforts in this area are directed to the
development of new protocols that promote efficient resources
utilization, mainly with respect to the power consumption [4], [5],
[6], [7]. Although these protocols are effective in extending the
lifetime of sensor networks, the gap between the protocols and the
application does not allow the protocols be effectively used by
application developers [8]. To make these protocols more useful,
application designers would benefit from a middleware layer that
hides details of communication protocols, whilst provides an API
(Application Programming Interface) that reduces the cost of
developing applications.
In this context, the design and implementation of an appropriate
middleware layer for fully realizing the capability of sensor
technologies and applications is now open. Traditional
middleware systems such as Java RMI (Remote Method
Invocation) [9], EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) [10] and CORBA
(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) [11] are normally
heavyweight in terms of memory and computation and therefore
not suitable for WSNs [12].
A middleware for WSN should facilitate development,
maintenance, deployment and execution of sensing-based
applications. To accomplish this, it is necessary to enable the
development of complex and high-level sensing tasks. These tasks
must be capable to: communicate with other tasks in the WSN,
coordinate sensors, be distributed amongst individual sensor
nodes, data merging of sensor readings in individual nodes into a
high-level result and report the result back to the task issuer.
Moreover, one should provide appropriate abstractions and
mechanisms for dealing with the heterogeneity of sensor nodes.
All mechanisms provided by a middleware system should respect
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2nd International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc
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