About the Research:

The Project: This summer I will be working with Dr. Payton and other summer interns on implementing and deploying the QueryME middleware, developed by Dr. Payton. The QueryME middleware was developed with the hope that it would simplify application programming for an ad hoc network. Application programming in an ad hoc network is often very difficult because the network is open and dynamic. This means that "nodes" (sensors, computers, anything that connect to an ad hoc network) can constantly be moving, appearing and disappearing. In your typical wireless router network, information about each node is known a priori. This is not the case for an ad hoc network. Because of the challenges involved in application programming for ad hoc networks, a middleware is often developed to help the application programmer access the network. Instead of having to know the nitty, gritty details of the network, the programmer can use the middleware to get information from the network.

To show and evaluate how that the QueryME middleware works, I will be creating an application to test the middleware. The application will also be used as an empical evaluation of QueryME. I will also be working with the sensors and will help port the middleware, which is coded in java, into something that can run on the sensors, which are running on TinyOS and nesC.

The hard part this summer will be getting the middleware working with the motes. Once I am able to do that then I will start to work on the application.

Goals: My goals this summer are to understand the QueryME middleware, create a functional application to be used on top of the middleware, and get QueryME running on the sensors. Ultimately, we would like to be able to deploy the sensors and iRobots in a construction simulation.