Querying and Tasking in Sensor Networks

With the advancement of hardware technology, it becomes feasible to develop a networked system of pervasive computing platforms that combine programmable general purpose computers with multiple sensing and wireless communication capability. This networked system of programmable sensor nodes, together called a sensor network, poses unique challenges on how information collected by and stored within the sensor network should be queried and accessed, and how concurrent sensing tasks should be programmed from external clients. In this paper, we describe an architecture that facilitates querying and tasking of sensor networks. The key idea to the architecture lies in the development of the Sensor Querying and Tasking Language (SQTL) and the corresponding Sensor Execution Environment (SEE). We model a sensor network as a distributed set of collaborating nodes that carry out querying and tasking activities programmed in SQTL. A frontend node injects a message, that encapsulates an SQTL program, into a sensor node and starts a diffusion computation. A sensor node may diffuse the encapsulated SQTL program to other nodes as dictated by its logic and collaborately perform the specified querying or tasking activity. We will present the SQTL language and demonstrate its applicability using a maximum temperature querying application and a vehicle tracking application.