An Architecture For Dynamic Reconfiguration Of Data Flows In Sensor Networks

In this paper, driven primarily from our experiences with experimental deployments, we propose an architecture that enables the dynamic manipulation of data-flows inside sensor networks. Our architecture introduces conventions for defining and managing wires that connect software agents both inside and across, possibly heterogeneous devices. By introducing the notion of filters, we enable the dynamic activation and deactivation of wires based on the values of the sensed data, thus effectively limiting the number of transmitted messages. Among other properties, our architecture provides the primitives for dynamically grouping software agents (and thus nodes) based on user or application defined criteria. One of our key design goals is to limit the necessary implementation changes required to integrate existing components in our larger architecture. Our presentation is interleaved with an application example which demonstrates, that by only adding the limited overhead of the proposed architecture, we can easily accomplish otherwise difficult tasks.