A Virtual Infrastructure for Wireless Sensor Networks

Overlaying a virtual infrastructure over a physical network is a time-honored strategy for conquering scale. There are, essentially, two approaches for building such an infrastructure. The first is to design the virtual infrastructure in support of a specific protocol, routing, for example. However, more often than not, the resulting infrastructure is not useful for other purposes. The alternative approach is to design the general-purpose virtual infrastructure with no particular protocol in mind. The challenge, of course, is to design the virtual infrastructure in such a way that it can be leveraged by a multitude of different protocols. The main goal of this chapter is to propose a lightweight and robust virtual infrastructure for a network, consisting of tiny energy-constrained commodity sensors massively deployed in an area of interest. In addition, we present evidence that the proposed virtual infrastructure can be leveraged by a number of protocols ranging from routing to data aggregation.