Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The objective of this research is to investigate new technologies that are targeted to support autonomic computing in multi-tier heterogeneous sensor networks. Autonomic computing systems are distributed computer systems that can manage themselves and therefore their complexities are invisible to end users. These systems rely heavily on feedback within the network to adapt their behaviour. Unlike sensor networks that simply collect and distribute sensory data to end users, an autonomic sensor network can aggregate and interpret sensory data and make decisions in the network that can affect the collection and routing of data within the network. A multi-tier sensor network is a sensor network that utilizes several different protocols; typically one layer will leverage Internet-based protocols (a SensorWeb) while the other layers use protocolscustomized for the particular network.With this high-level research objective in mind, several key research directions will be investigated. These are: the use of policy languages as a mechanism to facilitate customization and programming within sensor networks; the use of semantic knowledge to enable seamless inter operation between distributed sensor domains; support of sensory plug and play capabilities; and access control models for highly distributed sensor systems. A key challenge in all of these research directions is the interoperability between the sensor network layers, in particular the use of Internet-based protocols within resource constraint wireless sensor networks.