On Sensor Network Reconfiguration for Downtime-Free System Migration

Many state-of-the-art wireless sensor networks have been equipped with reprogramming modules, e.g., those for software/firmware updates. System migration tasks such as software reprogramming, however, will interrupt normal sensing and data processing operations of a sensor node. Although such tasks are occasionally invoked, the long time of such tasks may disable the network from detecting critical events, posing a severe threat to many sensitive applications. In this paper, we present the first formal study on the problem of downtime-free migration. We demonstrate that the downtime can be effectively eliminated, by partitioning the sensors into subsets, and let them perform migration tasks successively with the rest still performing normal services. We then present a series of effective algorithms, and further extend our solution The work was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CUHK4150/07E). J. Liu’s work was supported in part by a Canadian NSERC Discovery Grant and an NSERC Strategic Project Grant. Y. Zhou (B) · M. R. Lyu Department of Computer Science & Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected] M. R. Lyu e-mail: [email protected] J. Liu School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] to a practical distributed and localized implementation. The performance of these algorithms have been evaluated through extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate that our algorithms achieve good balance between the sensing quality and system migration time.