An Information Driven Sensornet Architecture Eli De Poorter Ingrid Moerman Piet Demeester Ghent University - IBBT, Department of Information Technology (INTEC) Gaston Crommenlaan 8, Bus 201, 9050 Ghent, Belgium Email: eli.depoorter@intec.ugent.be Abstract Most sensor networks do not support QoS or hetero- geneity. As a result, current sensor networks are not suited for next-generation applications, such as wireless building automation, process control or medical applica- tions. In this paper, we present an alternative architecture wherein the system is responsible for packet creation and packet manipulation. To support QoS, energy-efficiency and heterogeneity, the system intelligently combines in- formation exchanges from multiple network protocols in a single packet. We demonstrate that this approach is bet- ter suited for very demanding applications and prove that this approach is much more scalable, in terms of memory requirements, than tradition system architectures. Keywords: sensornet architecture; system architecture; QoS; energy efficiency; heterogeneity 1 Introduction Over the last years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have successfully been deployed to monitor nature and of- fice environments. More sophisticated applications, such as process monitoring and control, wireless building au- tomation, medical monitoring, disaster intervention or asset tracking, also benefit greatly from the use of many cheap sensor devices. However, the number of successful deploy- ments of these applications is far less. These next-generation applications impose many net- work requirements which are not found in traditional WSNs. • To provide sufficient end-user support, a WSN must be easy to update and maintain. Run-time addition of new services and network protocols should be supported. • WSNs will become heterogeneous [1, 2], containing both simple nodes (such as light switches) and more complex nodes (such as heating controllers). • Additionally, QoS requirements can no longer be ig- nored [3]. Medical, security and surveillance applica- tions require that each application has its own set of specific QoS requirements. • Since future applications will require even smaller nodes, new ways have to be found to ensure network protocols have a very small memory footprint. • Since most sensor nodes are battery powered, energy efficiency remains very important. At present, there is no architecture that supports all of these challenges. As stated by Culler et. al: “the primary factor currently limiting progress in sensornets is not any specific technical challenge but is instead the lack of an overall sensor network architecture” [4]. Therefore, in this paper, we present an information driven architecture (‘IDRA’) for wireless sensor networks. This framework is specifically designed to support next- generation WSN applications. It takes into account the heterogeneity of the sensor nodes and supports energy- efficiency and QoS at an architectural level. What’s more, the proposed architecture can be made fully compatible with existing legacy sensor networks. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss the advantages of using an information-oriented system architecture. Section 3 clari- fies how such an information-oriented architecture can be implemented. Next, in Section 4, we demonstrate how this architecture can be used to support energy efficiency, QoS, heterogeneity and legacy networks. In Section 5, we discusses possible shortcomings of the architecture. We describe our implementation experiences in Section 6 and compare the architecture with existing sensornet architec- tures in Section 7. Finally, Section 8 concludes the paper. 2 What is an information driven architec- ture? In theory, a network protocol gathers information from other nodes and ensures that passing information is relayed 2009 Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications 978-0-7695-3669-9/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SENSORCOMM.2009.92 553