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技术，在军事监视、基础设施保护、科学探索和智能环境等方面具有广泛的应用前景。迄今为止，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人研究问题。然而，由于对如何有效集成传感器网络的认识有限，如何构建高效的传感器网络系统以及如何创建可重复使用的传感器网络架构是研究人员面临的紧迫而富有挑战性的问题。在这个项目中，这些挑战是通过(i)基于两个设计原则为传感器网络创建一个架构结构来解决的，这两个设计原则在传感器网络的应用方面是新颖的：（ii）基于这两种设计原则开发各种新的组件解决方案，并从中提取可重用的设计模式；（iii）设计和实现一个称为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建立下一代传感器网络架构的关键设计原则，并创建这样的参考架构。这项工作的成功将有效地将大量单独的网络组件组织成高度可扩展和可重用的系统，从而降低设计、开发和维护成本，以构建有用的传感器系统。

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.