Expressing and Configuring Quality of Data in Multi-purpose Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are evolving towards interconnected, sensing, processing and actuating infrastructures that are expected to provide services for multiple concurrent applications. In a multi-purpose WSN, concurrently running applications share network resources and each may have varying Quality of Data (QoD) requirements. Our middleware targets these multi-purpose WSN deployments. Specifically this paper discusses how one should express and configure QoD properties for multi-purpose WSNs. We contribute by presenting our approach; which leverages per-instance QoD configuration and a separation of operational concerns to achieve simpler configuration and improve adaptability and customize-ability of the WSN. A prototype implementation and comparison to the related state of the art in WSNs are provided.