Dynamic Software Reconfiguration in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Dynamic software reconfiguration poses a major challenge to the widespread application of sensor networks. This thesis presents an approach for implementing dynamic software reconfiguration in sensor networks. The thesis proposes a software reconfiguration architecture that utilizes explicit models of the design space of the embedded application, captured by formally modeling all application software components. System requirements are expressed as formal constraints on QoS parameters that are measured at runtime. Reconfiguration is performed by transitioning from one point of the operation space to another based on the constraints. The software reconfiguration architecture implements components that communicate the latest configurations of the embedded application to the sensor nodes and that monitor the health of the network. The thesis presents a simple sensor network application that performs one-dimensional tracking to demonstrate the software reconfiguration architecture deployed over a sensor network testbed.