Nomadic Wireless Sensor Networks for Autonomic Pervasive Environments

Pervasive computing is one of the most promising research directions for the next future. More and more interest is devoted to the definition of protocols and paradigms for such challenging scenarios. It is envisioned that almost every object surrounding us will be accessible via some electronic device and will become, to some extent, a node of the communication super-structure. This, of course, will entail completely new problems to be addressed, since it will not be possible to man-age a network composed by billions of nodes with traditional Internet protocols. In order to overcome the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel communication paradigm that, despite its simplicity, provides a viable solution to the new all embracing pervasive environments, exploiting the implicit heterogeneity of the network nodes and the time/space depen-dence of the information circulating in the network. This article presents the approach and evaluates it through simulations in a real application scenario: a parking lot finding system.