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The role of autonomy in wireless sensor networks remains something of a controversial issue. Although the much of the early work in the field, and the subsequent research agenda, has implicitly assumed the use of autonomous sensor nodes, few if any of the practical implementations that have followed have featured autonomy at node level. These systems have been relatively small, and their operation poses few problems which require autonomy. At this scale, 'planned', non-autonomous systems are seen to be highly successful, so much so that the largest operation WSN so far achieved was designed using similar principles. In this paper the authors look forward to even larger networks, with 100,000 or more nodes, and it is argued that for these networks it is unlikely that 'planned' architectures will be feasible. Rather, a return to node-level autonomy as the basis for self-configuring, self-maintaining and self-optimising systems is proposed. The talk will review some of the work being undertaken by the Cogent Copmputing Applied research Centre (www.cogentcomputing.org ) towards this end. Several current projects will be brought forward, including work on Information extraction from WSNs, Information visualization and mapping, fault management and network discovery.
The presentation will be delivered by Sarah Mount and James Shuttleworth.