Spatio-Temporal Model for Role Assignment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are receiving increasing interest because of their role for data collection and processing in pervasive computing. While most research in the field of WSNs is more considered with resource constraint problems of the network like energy consumption and limited capabilities, there is a need for a higher level modeling of the network to allow the best use of the network [1]. Most of the work for semantic modeling of WSNs does not consider the temporal aspect of node’s operation. Time is considered as an external index of the state of the network, and mostly the snapshot model for time representation is used, which limits the reasoning capabilities of these networks. This paper proposes a spatio-temporal model for WSNs to enable reasoning about anytime, anywhere sensor’s actions. We use the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a framework for our model as it provides a structure for representing the dynamic features of reality in two ontologies for continuants and occurrence, as for the semantic representation of sensor nodes, the W3C Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) provides concepts for describing and connecting sensor nodes with their measurement technique and observation. Index Terms — Wireless sensor network, role assignment, ontology, spatio-temporal representation.