XAC project: Towards a middleware for open wireless sensor networks

In pervasive computing environment (Satyanarayanan, 2001), common context management system, that make context of the real world be shared among the context-aware applications, is required to reduce development cost of each context-aware applications. A wireless sensor network (WSN) will be a key infrastructure for the context management system. Towards pervasive computing, a WSN integrated into context management system should be open infrastructure. In an open WSN should (1)handle various kinds of tasks, (2)manage tasks at runtime, (3)save resource consumption, and (4)adapt to changes of environments. To develop such an open WSN, middleware supports are needed, and our XAC project tries to develop a middleware for the open WSN. The XAC project is a research project to develop a middleware for open WSN. In this chapter, the auhors show research issues related to open WSN from the viewpoints of task description language, runtime task management, self-adaptability, and security.