An Architecture to Support Mission Orientated Wireless Sensor Network Surveillance Applications

Sensor networks represent a powerful new data paradigm facilitating the development of new intelligent applications. In support of mission critical applications such as surveillance, sensors can be made to operate effectively in their deployed environments by adopting a “situation awareness” perspective. In this paper we present and adapt our VIGILANT “situation aware” system architecture to cater for mission orientation, in terms of the perceived surveillance threat and communication channel environment. By taking a joint context view, we envisage deployed sensors to self-organise efficiently into dynamic ad-hoc groups, based on a current threat “situation” with added tolerance to communication link disruption, thus maintaining mission objectives and quality of service reliability.