Building blocks for secure multiparty federated wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly being deployed in enterprise scenarios involving multiple actors. The capabilities of sensors must be shared across many applications and sensors must cooperate across federations spanning administrative domains. This paper describes our efforts towards constructing federated wireless sensor systems. It leverages and details key building blocks designed to achieve federation and sharing: a component model with distributed event-based communication, a policy-driven control infrastructure for resources and communications, a deployment architecture and a mechanism to establish and propagate trust into the wireless sensor network. The building blocks focus on the specific and necessary in-network extensions, such as extensions to sensor run-time, middleware and programming abstractions, rather than the backend challenges. The combination of the building blocks creates a security middleware that supports multiparty federated sensor networks. An estimate of the total cost of federation in terms of footprint is provided and first experiences of application of the middleware are reported upon.