MAMA: Multi-applicationmiddleware for efficient wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) motes are resource constrained devices. This is due to optimizations tailoring them towards application-specific and cost-efficient scenarios and setups. Many to most of these optimizations are built upon power aware aspects and dependability measures due to the fact that battery technology still evolves quite slowly and WSN's inherent redundancy is suitable for fault-tolerant schemes. What we do here is implementing a programming paradigm where several applications may be distributed heterogeneously among different subsets of a WSN's motes. Multiple applications can be run side by side on the same mote. This is far more efficient than deploying hardware for each and every application. The Multi-Application Mid-dlewAre (MAMA) layer allows running different TinyOS applications at the same time easily. Concurrent sensor usage and messaging is handled by MAMA. Results from simulation runs, hardware deployments, power profiling and scope measurements show good scalability, only little timing and memory overhead and power efficient properties.