A Component Framework for Content-Based Publish/Subscribe in Sensor Networks

Component-based architectures are the traditional approach to reconcile application specific optimization with reusable abstractions in sensor networks. However, they frequently overwhelm the application designer with the range of choices in component selection and composition. We introduce a component framework that reduces this complexity. It provides a well-defined content-based publish/subscribe service, but allows the application designer to adapt the service by making orthogonal choices about: (1) the communication protocol components for subscription and notification delivery, (2) the supported data attributes and (3) a set of service extension components. We present TinyCOPS, our implementation of the framework in TinyOS 2.0, and demonstrate its advantages by showing experimental results for different application configurations on two sensor node platforms in a large-scale indoor testbed.