A reconfigurable group management middleware service for wireless sensor networks

Group management service plays a key role in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as it provides support to high level middleware services such as object tracking, security, fault-tolerance, power management, and so on. However, the way a group is managed may vary either from service to service or according to system conditions (e.g., power level, connectivity, bandwidth). For example, the group management used by the security service may differ from one used by the fault-tolerance service. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation (TinyOS) of a group management middleware service that may be dynamically reconfigurable. In order to illustrate how the proposed service is adopted, we present the implementation of an object tracking service that needs the reconfigurable management group.