Managing Automation Data Flows in Sensor/Actuator Networks

Distributed sensing has been the primary application domain for sensor networks. Nevertheless, the capabilities of sensor devices have the potential to enable a new class of applications that use these devices not only for sensing, but also for actuation. We have developed a data flow management system called MicroToPSS that enables such applications using resource-constrained sensor devices. The system supports declarative specification of the data flow between components of an automation application, shared query processing, view-based distributed indexing, and data flow optimization. We describe how aggregation service can be implemented using MicroToPSS. We evaluate the system using a Berkeley Mote testbed and we extrapolate the results in a scale-up evaluation to 8100 nodes. We show that the data flow optimizer can improve the delivery rate by 50% in a testbed factory floor automation scenario and that it can support up to 3000 queries in a scale-up scenario.