Internet metadata framework for plug and play wireless sensor networks

Metadata, self-describing data about sensor nodes and sensing data, is needed to understand different capabilities provided by heterogeneous sensor networks. However, storing metadata in resource constrained sensor nodes is infeasible in terms of increased memory costs and multi-hop communication overheads. More than this, sensor networks have difficulties with supporting XMLs and high level models often used for describing metadata. To overcome the problem we propose metadata frameworks that store metadata in distributed servers on the Internet instead of sensor nodes. The metadata overheads in sensor nodes are minimized because sensor nodes store only a few bytes long identifier as a key to look up a metadata on distributed servers. New sensor node discovery that finds specific sensor nodes using desiring attributes against retrieved metadata is also presented. In this paper we present a new approach for enabling plug and play wireless sensor networks.