SmartMote: An Adaptive Update Mechanism for Wireless Ad-Hoc Sensor Network

This paper describes a novel update mechanism for large wireless ad-hoc sensor networks (WASNs). In wireless sensor networks, the nodes may have to be reprogrammed, especially for design-implement-test iterations. Manually reprogramming is a very cumbersome work, and may be infeasible if nodes of the network are unreachable. In addition, replacing the executed application on a node by transmitting the complete program image is inefficient for small changes in the code either. It consumes a lot of bandwidth and time. Therefore, an on-the-fly update mechanism is required. This paper exploits programmable packets to update sensor behaviors. To reduce the code transferred and power consumption, a group management architecture is developed. This architecture helps reduce power consumption and increase node number that control by Leader Node in WASNs. The proposed update mechanism, SmartMote, has been implemented on the Tmote-based Octopus II sensor node. Performance evaluation as well as measurement is conducted in the paper to illustrate the significance of the proposed mechanism.