Distributed services for information dissemination in self-organizing sensor networks

Dynamic enterprise systems, such as the battlefield, use self-organizing sensor network infrastructure to gather and disseminate real-time information for controlling the enterprise. Very large number of highly mobile sensor data sources and users may be scattered over a wide area with little or no fixed network support. These large surveillance sensor networks must adapt rapidly to dynamic changes in sensor nodes configuration. Dynamic query processing and target tracking through this unstructured sensor network of surveillance information sources and users must use the appropriate distributed services and network protocols to solve the problems of mobility, dispersion, weak and intermittent disconnection, dynamic reconfiguration and limited power availability. We provide three main distributed services: lookup service, composition service and dynamic adaptation service. Through a distributed implementation of these services, other application-specific network and system services can be defined spontaneously in the sensor network. They also enable dynamic adaptation of these services to incremental addition and removal of sensor nodes, device failure and degradation, migration of sensor nodes, and changing requirements in tasks and networks. When placed together impromptu, sensor nodes should immediately know about the capabilities and functions of other smart nodes and work together as a community system to perform coordinated tasks and networking functionalities.