DCM-Arch: An Architecture for Data, Control, and Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

An increasing number of research efforts on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are now considering dynamic environments with heterogeneous sensor devices. Most of this research considers data, control, and management issues separately and not clearly within a common architecture. This paper presents our development of an architecture, namely DCM-Arch, to address these issues together. The architectureconsists of three-planes of functionalities (in the verticaldimension): 1) data, 2) control, and 3) management; and four-tiers of network infrastructures (in the horizontal dimension): 1) routing and network infrastructure, 2) logical network infrastructure, 3) adaptation middleware, and 4) component-based software application. The data plane handles the information storage, reduction, and dissemination in WSNs. The control plane deals with the lightweight sensor adaptation and reconfiguration middleware to cope with the dynamic changes of the environment. Finally, the management plane provides the context management functions, e.g. for collaboration and reasoning, to allow sensors, coordinators, and sinks to make good decisions about adaptation and reconfiguration. While the vertical dimension describes the functionalities of DCM-Arch, its four-tiers provide the required facilities to achieve those functionalities.