Collaborative Research: NeTS-NOSS: Essentia: Architecting Sensor Systems with Asymmetric Funtion Placement and Reflective Composition

无线传感器网络是一项新兴的技术，在军事监视、基础设施保护、科学探测和智能环境等方面具有广阔的应用前景。到目前为止，这一领域的研究人员已经积累了大量的组成部分，有效地解决了广泛的个别研究问题。然而，由于对如何有效地集成这些组件的了解有限，如何构建高效的传感器网络系统以及如何创建可复用的传感器网络体系结构以供广泛使用，是研究人员面临的紧迫而具有挑战性的问题。在本项目中，通过(I)基于两个设计原则来创建传感器网络的体系结构，这两个设计原则在传感器网络中的应用是新颖的：非对称功能布局和反射组合；(Ii)基于这两个设计原则开发各种新的组件解决方案，并从中提取可复用的设计模式；(Iii)设计并实现一个称为Essentia的参考实现，以研究如何将这些设计原则应用于广泛的传感器网络功能和应用。这项工作的主要影响是确立了下一代传感器网络体系结构的关键设计原则，并创建了这样的参考体系结构。这项工作的成功将有效地将大量独立的网络组件组织成高度可扩展和可重复使用的系统，从而降低构建有用的传感器系统的设计、开发和维护成本。

Wireless Sensor Networks is a new technology with many promising applications, such as military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration and smart environments. To date, researchers in this area have accumulated a large portfolio of components, effectively addressing a wide range of individual research problems. However, because of the limited understanding on how to integrate the components effectively, researchers are facing urgent and challenging questions on how to build efficient sensor network systems and how to create reusable sensor network architecture for widespread use. In this project, these challenges are addressed by (i) creating an architecture structure for sensor networks based on two design principles which are novel with respect to their application to sensor networks: asymmetric function placement and reflective composition, (ii) developing various new component solutions based on these two design principles, and extracting reusable design patterns from them, and (iii) designing and implementing a reference implementation, called Essentia, to investigate how these design principles can be applied over a wide range of sensor network functions and applications. The major impacts of this work are establishing the key design principles for the next generation of sensor network architecture and creating such reference architecture. The success of this work will effectively organize the large set of individual network components, into highly extensible and reusable systems, consequently reducing the design, development and maintenance cost for building useful sensor systems.