Overview Of Tenet: Architecture For Tiered Sensor Networks

Most sensor network research and software design has been guided by an architectural principle that permits multi-node data fusion on small-form-factor, resource-poor nodes, or motes. We argue that this principle leads to fragile and unmanageable systems and explore an alternative. The Tenet architecture is motivated by the observation that future large-scale sensor network deployments will be tiered, consisting of motes in the lower tier and masters, relatively unconstrained 32-bit platform nodes, in the upper tier. Masters provide increased network capacity. Tenet constrains multimode fusion to the master tier while allowing motes to process locallygeneratedsensor data. This simplifies application development and allows mote-tier software to be reused. Applications running on masters task motes by composing task descriptions from a novel tasklet library. OurTenet implementation also contains a robust and scalable networking subsystem for disseminating tasks and reliably delivering responses. We show that a Tenet pursuit-evasion application exhibits performancecomparable to a mote-native implementation while being considerably more compact.