Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Electronic Engineering

First Advisor

Dr.Susan Rea

Second Advisor

Dr. Dirk Pesch

Abstract

The relentless demand for pervasive computing in our everyday lives has led to and will continue to drive the roll out of large scale embedded systems in the form of Wireless Sensor Networks or WSNs in our environment. This in turn drives the need for reusable, flexible and manageable WSN infrastructures. To simplify system operation and maintenance as well as to reduce costs, WSNs must become an infrastructure that is capable of providing services to multiple end users concurrently rather than having to roll out individual infrastructures for specific purposes as is typical nowadays. This thesis presents the concept of a WSN infrastructure as a WSN Cloud that provides services to multiple end user organisations and is designed to adhere to the cloud computing paradigm.

The challenges faced by such an infrastructure organisation is to efficiently provision it in such a manner that each instance of the WSN cloud (i.e. a specific set of services configured by a particular end user/system) utilises the WSN infrastructure as if it was a unique network provisioned for their specific requirements. The WSN- Service Orchestration Architecture WSN-SOrA presented in this thesis enables the rapid orchestration, commissioning and provisioning of services in WSNs, which can be vertically scaled on-demand. WSN- SOrA is an architectural model that enables on demand access to a shared pool of configurable WSN resources whose primary function is the management of the allocation and consumption of WSN resources in order to serve multiple applications and end users alike. The key architectural elements of WSN-SOrA are the orchestration engine and Serviceware middleware components which together provide an end- 2-end middleware across all tiers of the WSN infrastructure. In order to create a virtual sensor network, the orchestration engine middleware configures the enterprise and gateway components, encapsulate the end user requirements and virtualises the network, with the Serviceware middleware virtualising the WSN resources and provisioning services at this tier.

Access Level

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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