Application Areas

• Wireless and Network Virtualization

Quick Pitch

An architecture for community sensor grids is proposed based on wireless PAN slicing and virtualization.

Abstract

Mesh-connected wireless sensor networks have been traditionally designed to be privately owned and used, which leads to custom programmability and application-specific in-situ/in-network processing. While this is often essential for the energy-efficient design of the network, a downside of private ownership is that it does not lend itself easily to a variety of usage scenarios, especially community-based sharing. Community-based participatory sensing, as exemplified in Microsoft Research’s SensWeb and SensorMap projects build on data-only sharing model with almost no programmability support in the acquisition network. On the other hand, total access to a sensor WPAN is often implemented based on pre-planned time-sharing, as in the case of most sensor network testbeds.rnWe solve this dilemma by slicing the WPAN and running a task per slice. In addition, we can stitch designated slices coming off a cluster of neighboring host WPAN substrates into a single untethered virtual WPAN slice. All we need is that the virtual nodes have unique identities pertaining to a particular slice. This is why we assign a different PAN-id to each slice so that we may ensure this node uniqueness by planned re-assignment of node-ids within slices. Thus, a node (mote) has multiple incarnations characterized by its combination.

Technical Proposal

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Personal Statement

Team leader, Amiya Bhattacharya has been involved in research in mobile and pervasive computing and networking for more than a decade. Co-inventor, Partha Dasgupta has been active in research areas including operating systems, distributed systems and systems security for more than two decades. Graduate research assistant, Meddage Saliya Fernando has been working on the project almost from its inception and has contributed substantially to the implementation of the middleware for mote-level virtualization in TinyOS.