Adaptive service provisioning for wireless sensor networks

Abstract: Service provisioning has gained significant attention as a promising programming model for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Its key idea is to exploit the decoupling of service providers and consumers to enable platform-independent applications that are dynamically bound to platform-specific services. We explore novel adaptive service binding strategies that are able to cope with network dynamics and to promote energy conservation. To achieve this goal, we developed policies and algorithms that automatically switch providers in response to network topology changes and adapt application behavior when opportunities for energy savings surface. The latter is accomplished by providing limited information about the energy consumption associated with using various services, by systematically exploiting opportunities for sharing service invocations, and by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication in WSNs. The policies and algorithms have been implemented and evaluated on two disparate WSN platforms, the TelosB and Imote2. Empirical results show that adaptive service provisioning can significantly increase service availability and enable energy-aware service binding decisions that result in increased energy efficiency, while imposing minimal additional burden on the application, service, and device developers. Applications involving medical patient monitoring and structural health monitoring are used in the evaluation process