Reprogramming in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

With advances in sensor networking technology, new applications involving remote and real-time data collection are becoming popular and becoming increasingly deployed. For applications that are deployed in remote locations or deployed at a large scale, over-the-air remote programming may be needed to update the application code executing on the sensor nodes. Deluge is a protocol that provides the capability of remotely reprogramming nodes in a wireless sensor networks. This protocol accomplishes reprogramming by injecting messages containing the code image into the network, which are then installed by the sensor nodes. While this protocol is very useful, it is applicable only to homogeneous networks wherein all nodes in the network must be programmed with the same code. This paper proposes a protocol that allows remote reprogramming of only a specific node in the network with a new code image. This allows different nodes to be programmed with different images, which is required in heterogeneous applications. The protocol has been implemented using Java and nesC on a network of sensor nodes. We have conducted extensive experimentation to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed protocol. We present results to show that our protocol is able to reprogram specific nodes in less time as compared to the original Deluge protocol, and is able to simultaneously deploy multiple applications on different subset of nodes. Keywords— Sensor networks, pervasive systems, Remote data collection, communication protocols