A Survey on Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network is an emerging field and it offers a wide variety of applications that include habitat monitoring, object tracking, environmental surveillance, military systems, health care, precision agriculture, building monitoring etc. However, due to their unique characteristics and the constraints they suffer from, sensor networks pose considerable challenges and make application development quite complicated .There is a necessity of an intermediate software layer between the sensor hardware and the sensor network applications that may be termed as middleware. Middleware is necessary in order to fully meet the design and implementation challenges of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we highlight the main design challenges of wireless sensor networks and present a study on the existing middleware approaches for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the scope of Quality of Service support at middleware layer for wireless sensor networks. The paper is concluded with future research directions in the middleware level to meet the requirements of emerging applications of wireless sensor networks.