Adaptable Protocol Stack Architecture for Future Sensor Networks

ion, SP [61] also aims to share neighborhood information and message pool with all other protocols. While sharing of information is motivated similarly to IES, SP is confined only to link layer information, and they do not provide generic publish/subscribe interface like IES. Also, SP does not allow rule-based event notification as done in IES. Message passing and information exchange is inherent in any distributed system, especially systems providing network services, e.g., directory service, peer-to-peer systems, network monitoring, and sensor networks. Recent research projects [83, 85, 73, 84] have looked at scalability and self-configuration aspects of utilizing these distributed information for controlling the application and network behavior. While there is rich insight into accessing remote information even in a very large network, past research has mostly ignored how to use this information to facilitate developing adaptive applications and adaptive protocol stack. Network weather service [83] provides mechanisms to gather network information by employing soft sensors and statistical prediction algorithms. Astrolabe [73] provides a scalable system for disseminating sensor information in a large distributed system. Astrolabe uses aggregation techniques to provide compressed view of a network zone while still providing consistency guarantees. The declarative interface of IES is motivated by research work on publish/subscribe systems [48, 22]. Distributed systems research community has looked extensively at eventbased systems, and such research has helped in shaping the IES design choices.