Service Provisioning Middleware for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Earlier, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications tended to follow the traditional format of being specific to a device. Later, when applications evolved integrating heterogeneous devices, it rendered difficulty in enforcing a common standard among all the diverse devices. In order to handle this, a lot of WSN middleware platforms emerged to bind the application interaction with the heterogeneous devices through heterogeneous interfaces. This started increasing the service-based applications while decreasing the device-based applications. Apart from not only providing the classic task of reading the information from the sensor network, the middleware support were extended to address interoperability, management, security, and privacy. However, still there exists an important issue, which many of the existing middleware fail to address. For instance, the network design scenario varies depending on the application context. However, most of the existing middleware operate on the default network infrastructure and data dissemination protocol to collect the data and perform other tasks on the network. Therefore, there is a requirement to include support for customizing the network configuration for an application requirement with respect to its context. Hence, in this work, a service provisioning middleware based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed. To support network customization, in the middleware layer, a decision algorithm is proposed. It is used for generating the configuration file according to the application requirement. This service provisioning middleware would serve as a generic model for adapting to the required network environment.