Section: Application Domains

Sensor-based applications

The advances in hardware development have made possible the miniaturization of micro-electro-mechanical systems and consequently, the development of wireless sensor networks. The combination of inexpensive, autonomous, low-power sensing, and compact devices has improved the viability of deploying large and dense wireless sensor networks able to sense the physical world. By essence, such networks require fully decentralized solutions in which the load is evenly balanced in the system, merely because participating entities have limited in power, storage and communication capabilities.

As opposed to Internet-based applications, entities, here sensors, communicate through radio links and have therefore a limited communication range. This imposes hard constraints on the structure of the resulting topology. More specifically, the overlay structure is highly dependent on the physical topology. Also, sensors, if embedded in human body for example, might be mobile. They might also fail, having some limiting physical capabilities. These properties make such systems highly dynamic.

In this context, we are targeting two main applications: data monitoring and physical databases . In the latter applications, as opposed to software databases virtualizing the real objects, sensors embedded on objects themselves can communicate to provide similar functionalities.