ReWiSe: A New Component Model for Lightweight Software Reconfiguration in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly being deployed for applications with dynamic requirements. Moreover, these applications are likely to be run on nodes with different sensing parameters and capabilities. Addressing these issues in higher layers of WSNs architecture such as middleware and application, beside the consideration of lower layers, is of high importance. Reconfiguration of application software is an effective approach for addressing such issues. The special characteristics and limitations of WSNs make the requirements to the reconfiguration mechanism quite different from what has been previously proposed for other types of networks. In this paper, we propose a new software component model, namely ReWiSe, for achieving lightweight and fine-grained software reconfiguration in WSNs. In this model, a component can be reconfigured at the behavior-level instead of at the component-level. We discuss how the new component model can make the reconfiguration process lightweight in terms of component state preservation, component dependency checking, and new update unit granularity.