On the Management of Wireless Sensor Networks<br /> DOI: 10.14209/jcis.2004.15

Abstract

During the last decade, there was a great technological advance in the development of smart sensors, powerful processors, and wireless communication protocols that when put together create a wireless sensor network (WSN). A wireless sensor network aims to colIect data and, sometimes, control an environment. This kind of network is composed of hundreds to thousands of elements, calIed sensor nodes, which are often referred as a new class of computer systems, distinguished from the hardware of the past by their ubiquity and their colIective analytical skilI. The sensor nodes are projected with smalI dimensions (cm3 or mm3) and this size limitation ends up restraining the their resources, like energy, processor and transceiver capacity. Smart, autonomous, and self-aware: that is the ultimate vision for WSNs. The success of this vision depends fundamentally on the self-management solutions. In this paper we have proposed to use autonomic computing as a paradigm to implement self-managed WSNs a case study, we focus on a class of hierarchical and heterogeneous WSNs where network elements colIect data and send them to observers continuously along time. The cost of sending data continuously may lead to a more rapid consumption of the scarce network resources and, thus, shorten the WSN lifetime. However, this is an important kind of WSN and we show that the use of some selfmanagement services proposed by MANNA architecture can promote the productivity of the resource and control the quality of the services provided.