Middleware Performance Evaluation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of middleware to develop distributed applications liberates the programmer of the concerns (communication and coordination among software components) imposed by the distributed network environment. Besides these concerns, in wireless sensor networks are considered, also, their specific characteristics (address, mobility, amount and limited resources of the sensor nodes). This paper describes the performance evaluation of Sensor Bus, a message-oriented adaptive middleware for wireless sensor networks that uses policies to assist to the several characteristics of the wireless sensor networks. Policies are implemented in an application profile, through metadata, encoded in XML documents. Performance evaluation of Sensor Bus is made through their two main services: message and context. We used measurement techniques to carry out the experiments with objective of analyzing the impact of two routing protocols in the middleware also to show that using metadata to incorporate policies in the middleware does not imply undue overheads.