A method for application reconfiguration in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in physical environments that change over time. For this reason, wireless sensor networks need to be aware of these changes automatically and make a reconfiguration decisions to adapt to new applications. However, the existing approaches mainly focus on client/server-based reconfiguration architecture for sensor nodes. They are not flexible enough to cope automatically with unexpected changes in the environment. Moreover, periodically information exchanges between sensor nodes and the central control server produces expensive communication consumption and long response delays. In addition, client/server-based reconfiguration techniques need a wireless sensor network to maintain stable network connectivity. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a mobile agent-based application reconfiguration method (MAAR) for wireless sensor networks. The main advantage of the proposed method is to change application requirements to adapt to new applications in dynamic environments. Experiments have been carried out to study the effectiveness and the benefits of the MAAR. An application scenario is implemented in the environment monitoring of intelligence building. A client/server-based application reconfiguration method (CSAR) and MAAR are used separately. We choose to use two metrics, the communication time and the energy cost, to evaluate the performance of CSAR and MAAR in the application reconfiguration. The simulation results show that the MAAR provides greater flexibility for collaboration between the sensors and a better performance than CSAR in terms of the communication time and energy cost.