Service Architecture

The ability of a sensor network to closely interact with the environment in which it has been deployed gives rise to a multitude of applications in which code execution is tightly linked to the locations of environmental events. Appropriate communication abstractions are required to isolate distributed application programmers from accounting for the changing locations of environmental events in the vicinity of which the communication end-points of their applications are located. Our architecture provides such abstractions by a combination of (i) a team management framework for maintaining proper mapping between communication endpoints and external events (ii) a transport layer protocol for communication among event-related endpoints. Together, they maintain communication end-points associated with mobile external events, as well as maintain connectivity among such endpoints. This architecture is independent of the underlying radio, data link, and network layer protocols making it applicable in principle to an array of sensor network platforms.

Such programming abstractions are desired in applications where one wishes to interact with physical events in the environment that, for one reason or another, do not communicate directly with the network. By forming an abstract entity that moves with the event, we can associate state and behavior with the physical event. For a hostile target being tracked, this state and behavior could include monitoring the number of shots fired from a tank or the distance an object has traveled.