Reprogramming Wireless Sensor Networks with a Selective and Incremental Approach

A wireless sensor network can be formed by nodes from different manufacturers, as long as their radio component enables communication with each other. Sometimes it is necessary to change the program in the nodes and several over-the-air reprogramming mechanisms have been proposed for that purpose. We base our work in one of such mechanisms, Deluge, adding some important contributions: we allow the selection of a set of nodes to be reprogrammed (not exclusively the whole network) and we allow incremental reprogramming (it is not mandatory to send complete program images). Through experiments with a real network we show that our proposal brings several benefits related to less traffic and less time spent in reprogramming tasks, which saves energy by using less the radio interface.