TinyDDS: An Interoperable and Configurable Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to stringent constraints in memory footprint, processing efficiency and power consumption, traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs) face two key issues: (1) a lack of interoperability with access networks and (2) a lack of flexibility to customize non-functional properties such as event filtering, data aggregation and routing. In order to address these issues, this chapter investigates interoperable publish/subscribe middleware for WSNs. The proposed middleware, called TinyDDS, enables the interoperability between WSNs and access networks by providing programming language interoperability and protocol interoperability based on the standard Data Distribution Service (DDS) specification. Moreover, TinyDDS provides a pluggable framework that allows WSN applications to have fine-grained control over application-level and middleware-level non-functional properties. Simulation and empirical evaluation results demonstrate that TinyDDS is lightweight and efficient on the TinyOS and SunSPOT platforms. The results also show that TinyDDS simplifies the development of publish/subscribe WSN applications.