Expressing and Configuring Quality of Data in Multipurpose Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are evolving towards interconnected, sensing, processing and actuating infrastructures that are expected to provide services for multiple concurrent applications. In a multipurpose WSN, concurrently running applications share network resources and each may have varying Quality of Data (QoD) requirements. The authors' middleware targets these multi-purpose WSN deployments. Specifically this paper discusses how one should express and configure QoD properties for multi-purpose WSNs. They contribute by presenting their approach; which leverages per-instance QoD configuration and a separation of operational concerns to achieve simpler configuration and improve adaptability and customize-ability of the WSN. A prototype implementation and comparison to the related state of the art in WSNs are provided.