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technical work will focus mostly on architectural, protocol
and software issues. This area is in fact believed to
be the true bottleneck in current sensor networks. The
challenges to face in developing new technologies for
sensor networks are the need for the nodes to be smart,
self-configurable, capable of networking together, and
the inherent poverty of resources of the nodes themselves.
The main thrust of the work will therefore be directed
towards the development of new architectural schemes and
communications protocols and algorithms at multiple layers,
taking into account those specific features. In particular,
schemes, which are able to work efficiently in the presence
of limited energy, processing power and memory, will be
developed.
In
the EYES architecture, applications rely on a
two-level structure. The lower layer deals with
sensors and networking, whereas the upper layer
provides distributed services to the application
by using the networking and transport capabilities
offered by the lower layer. Detailed architectural
studies will be carried out during a system
architecture workpackage (WP1),
whose aim is to produce an open framework for
flexible development of new applications.
According
to this architectural view, there are two main
research workpackages. WP2 (sensors
and networking) will develop technology
for communications and networking, including internal
sensor architecture, distributed wireless access,
routing protocols, reliable end-to-end transport,
synchronization and localisation of nodes. WP3
(Distributed
Services) deals with the service
layer, which supports mobile sensor applications,
and will address issues and services such as information
collection, lookup, discovery, security.
As
a vehicle to show the usability of a sensor network,
a large-scale sensor network (100+ nodes) will
be built and some of the developed algorithms
will be implemented and tested (WP4, Proof-of-Concept).
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