Resource Management for Advanced, Heterogeneous Sensor-Actor-Networks

Sensor-Actor-Networks (SANET) consist of several heterogeneous subsystems, which provide specific capabilities for measuring or manipulating its environment. During the runtime, the communication infrastructure as well as communication tasks and the available communication resources are changing dynamically. Furthermore, advanced application scenarios in this domain have strict requirements regarding to the minimal system uptime, QoS features or backup strategies. In this context, one of the most challenging objectives for researchers all over the world is the efficient integration and handling of heterogeneous, distributed SANET components to ensure a reliable and stable system operation. In respect of this issue, we present a novel cross-layer resource management approach for advanced SANET. We are now able to reallocate communication resources for each subsystem ondemand during the runtime. For this purpose, we developed a real-time radio standard integration concept and respective routing strategies with adaptive multi-standard, multi-interface metrics. A respective real-world demonstrator was designed and implemented. Based on this platform, we start a proof of concept evaluation and analyse the operational behaviour of a given SANET testbed configuration. The proposed measurements clarify the necessity as well as the feasibility of an intelligent, integrated resource management unit for advanced SANET architectures. Keywords-Energy Efficiency, Resource Management, Channel Reallocation, Dynamic Optimisation, Embedded Systems, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Sensor-Actor-Networks (SANET)