Virtual Full Replication for Scalable and Adaptive Real-Time Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have limited resources and often support large-scale applications that need scalable propagation of sensor data to users. The authors propose a whiteboard style of communication in sensor networks using a distributed real-time database supporting virtual full replication with adaptive segmentation. This allows mobile client nodes to access, transparently and efficiently, any sensor data at any node in the network. They present a two-tiered wireless architecture, and an adaptation protocol, for scalable and adaptive whiteboard communication in large-scale sensor networks. Sensor value readings at nodes of the sensor tier are published at nodes of the database tier as database updates to objects in a distributed real-time database. The search space of client nodes for sensor data is thus limited to the number of database nodes.