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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.
Subsections
Next: The Entity Communication Problem
Up: An Entity Maintenance and
Previous: Related Work
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2003-03-05