The aim of this project is to provide a multi-level infrastracture of interconnected testbeds of large-scale wireless sensor networks for research purposes, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the aspects of hardware, software, algorithms, and data. This will demonstrate how heterogeneous small-scale devices and testbeds can be brought together to form well-organized, large-scale structures, rather than just some large network; it will allow research not only at a much larger scale, but also in different quality, due to heterogeneous structure and the ability to deal with dynamic scenarios, both in membership and location.
For the interdisciplinary area of wireless sensor networks, establishing the foundations of distributed, interconnected testbeds for an integrated approach to hardware, software, algorithms, and data will allow a new quality of practical and theoretical collaboration, possibly marking a turning point from individual, hand-tailored solutions to large-scale, integrated ones.
For this end, we will engage in implementing recent theoretical results on algorithms, mechanisms and protocols and transform them into software. We will apply the resulting code to the scrutiny of large-scale simulations and experiments, from which we expect to obtain valuable feedback and derive further requirements, orientations and inputs for the long-term research. We intend to make these distributed laboratories available to the European scientific community, so that
other research groups will take advantage of the federated infrastructure. Overall, this means pushing the new paradigm of distributed, self-organizing structures to a different level.
