Avaliação de abordagens de gerenciamento para redes de sensores sem fio

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are ad hoc wireless networks that present hardware and energy reserve restrictions. In general, this kind of network is applied on large scale and at environments with hard access to human beings. Wireless sensor networks management aims to control resources usage in order to guarantee the network productivity. Given the WSNs specific characteristics like the huge amount of elements, their application at remote environments and the restrictions of the elements that composed them, among others, it can be noticed that management tasks may be important to satisfy the goals of the application.In order to apply management functionalities in this kind of network, it is necessary to choose the approach that will be used to gather and process information related to control and supervision. The choice of an adequate approach to a specific application is an important task to the network designers once it influences the network functioning and performance. In this work three management approaches are evaluated in WSNs context: mobile agent based, request/response and event report. We have done performance and functional evaluation of the approaches with the intention of evaluate scalability and the impact of management functionalities and indicate the adequateness of the approaches in specific applications. Once the mobile agent based approach is innovative to this kind of network its evaluation has been performed in more details.The results reveal that each approach has advantages and disadvantages. The choice of the approach to be used in an application must consider the network scale, management complexity, communication faults propensity and the application itself. For example, in general the mobile agents based approach is more adequate to more elaborated applications that need new functionalities dynamically. On the other hand, request/response and event report approaches can be used by simpler applications. Regarding the mobile agents based approach, we have discussed some aspects that make it more difficult to use and proposed alternatives to turn it more efficient in WSNs.