Diffusion Filters as a Flexible Architecture for Event Notification in Wireless Sensor Networks

John Heidemann, Fabio Silva, Yan Yu, Deborah Estrin, and Padmaparma Haldar
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks represent an increasingly important example of distributed event systems. Unlike Internet-based distributed event systems, sensor networks are very bandwidth constrained and use sensor nodes that are often dedicated to the network and controlled by a single organization. Bandwidth constraints require, and administrative homogeneity allows, sensor networks to employ in-network processing, where application-specific code is used in the network to optimize data movement. The contribution of this paper is to describe the diffusion filter architecture, a software structure for a distributed event system that allows user-supplied software to interact with event routing. Sensor network nodes will span a wide range of capabilities, from tiny single-address space embedded processors to to desktop-class 32-bit computers. A second contribution of our architecture that it scales from 16- to 32-bit computers with OS support for single or multiple address spaces. We describe what software approaches facilitate this flexibility and quantify the performance differences.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Heidemann02a

John Heidemann, Fabio Silva, Yan Yu, Deborah Estrin, and Padmaparma Haldar. Diffusion Filters as a Flexible Architecture for Event Notification in Wireless Sensor Networks. Technical Report ISI-TR-556, USC/Information Sciences Institute, April, 2002. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann02a.html>.

@techreport{Heidemann02a,
	author = "John Heidemann and Fabio Silva and Yan Yu and Deborah Estrin and Padmaparma Haldar",
	title = "Diffusion Filters as a Flexible Architecture for Event Notification in Wireless Sensor Networks",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2002",
	number = "ISI-TR-556",
	month = "April",
	keywords = "diffusion software structure, micronetworking",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann02a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann02a.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2002 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.