Architecture for Dynamic Information Dissemination and Fusion in Distributed Sensor Networks

In many embedded and distributed applications, very large number of sensors are deployed to gather important information for remote surveillance, continual monitoring and distributed target tracking. These sensors may be highly mobile and scattered over a wide area. Dissemination and fusion of real-time sensor information through these large self-organizing sensor networks must adapt rapidly to dynamic changes in sensor nodes configuration. In our system architecture, three main distributed services – lookup service, composition service, and dynamic adaptation service – provide support for dynamic information dissemination and fusion that adapt to incremental addition and removal of sensor nodes, device failure and degradation, migration of sensor nodes, and changing requirements in tasks and networks. These distributed services executing over a diffusion network layer to alleviate the problems of mobility, disconnection, dynamic reconfiguration, and limited power. When placed together impromptu, sensor nodes dynamically determine the capabilities of other sensor nodes and coordinate together to disseminate and fuse sensor information.