Trends and Challenges of Wireless Sensor Networks

Summary form only given: The interest for sensor networks has been rapidly growing in the last years and the number of applications using sensor networks is increasing rapidly. However, the adoption of wireless sensor network technology has been hindered by the difficulty to program them in a simple and efficient way. In this key note we will talk about trends of development of sensor networks and a forward looking way to tackle some of the related challenges for broad deployment. In particular, we will present some of the work done at the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) to develop an integrated programming model based on the .Net technology. The programming model enables the development of a sensor network application as a set of connected services (filters and aggregators) forming a data flow. The set of defined services is dynamically deployed on the sensor networks where the runtime associated to the programming model and running on the nodes of the sensor networks, applies some optimization strategies in order to limit the amount of communications required to execute the application. This programming model is based on the coordination decentralized software services (DSS) and the concurrency and coordination runtime (CCR) developed by the Microsoft Robotics Studio team and further apply to the wireless sensor domain. It has been validated by the development of several applications in the context of collaborative projects in which EMIC is involved.