A component-based approach for service distribution in sensor networks

The increasing number of distributed applications over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in ubiquitous environments raises the need for high-level mechanisms to distribute sensor services and integrate them in modern IT systems. Existing work in this area mostly focuses on low-level networking issues, and fails to provide high-level and off-the-shelf programming abstractions for this purpose. In this paper, we therefore consider WSN programming models and service distribution as two interrelated factors and we present a new component-based abstraction for integrating WSNs within existing IT systems. Our approach emphasizes on reifying distribution strategies at the software architecture level, thus allowing remote invocation of component services, and facilitating interoperability of sensor services with the Internet through Web service-enabled components. The latter is efficiently provided by incorporating the REST architectural style---emphasizing on abstraction of high-level services as resources---to our component-based framework. The preliminary evaluation results show that the proposed framework has an acceptable memory overhead on a TelosB sensor platform.