The SCADDS project explores scalable coordination architectures for deeply distributed and dynamic systems ( e.g. wireless sensor networks) . Nodes in these systems will be heterogeneous, having a range of sensing, actuation and communication capabilities. Many deeply distributed systems will require nodes that are small, low-power, mobile, and wireless. In such systems, nodes lose their individuality. For example, a large sensor net application should not be designed to answer questions like: What is the temperature reading at sensor #27 now? Instead, the DATA generated by these devices should be the focus of all communication, independent of which node collected the data originally, and which nodes currently store it. This paradigm shift requires a different coordination architecture, motivated and elaborated upon in greater detail in our Mobicom 99 research challenges paper, " Scalable Coordination in Sensor Networks ".
In particular, we have focused on the following research topics.