Scoping in wireless sensor networks: a position paper

One of the trends of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to allow multiple applications to run on top of the same sensor network. This will have an enormous impact on the way WSN applications are developed, deployed and maintained. Many applications for WSN are still developed on very low level functions provided by simple operating systems or bare hardware. Alternatively, generic WSN middleware focuses on very high-level system abstractions, such as declarative query languages, and acts as black box that tries to automatically map applications to the underlying resources. In this paper, we propose scopes as a generic abstraction for the definition of groups of nodes. They bridge the gap between high- and low-level interfaces and enable the partitioning of WSN functionality. As middleware building block they facilitate the construction of tailored services in multipurpose WSNs.