Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming an increasingly technology that will be used in a variety of applications such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure management, public safety, medical, home and office security, transportation, and military. WSNs will also play a key role in pervasive computing where computing devices and people are connected to the Internet. However, until now, WSNs and their applications have been developed without considering a integrated management solution. The task of building and deploying autonomic management systems, in environments where there will be tens of thousand of network elements with particular features and organization, is very complex. This task becomes worse due to the physical restrictions of the sensor nodes, in particular energy and bandwidth restrictions. The management application to be built also depends on the kind of application being monitored. The talk will present a perspective on emerging wireless sensor management, covering management issues and technologies, network management architectures, and opportunities. Traditional management and the differences of the sensor networks management are described, and a new management dimension is introduced. Management architectures for sensor network and information models are outlined, with emphasis on the MANNA architecture. Until now, WSNs and their applications and services have been developed without considering a management solution. This may not be a problem for small networks but will definitely be when applications, in order to work properly, will need to reconfigure and adapt themselves based on profiles and information scattered over the network. Management of WSNs is a new research area that only recently started to receive attention from the research community.
Linnyer Beatrys Ruiz (linnyer@cpdee.ufmg.br) is an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. Her areas of interest and research include computer networks, autonomic networking, and wireless sensor networks. She received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from UFMG, a M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and industrial information from the Federal Center of Technological Education of Paran? (CEFETPR), Brazil, in 1996, and a B.Sc. degree in computer engineering from PUCPR. She held a post-doctoral position at the UFMG, 2004. She is an expert in telecommunications management network (TMN). Since 1993 she has participated in and coordinated research groups on TMN. Currently, she is coordinating the WSN group in the Electrical Engineering Department of UFMG. She is also the co-leader of MANNA research team. She works at the SensorSim project, which deals with the development of a framework for wireless sensor networks simulation. She has also participated of Sensornet project (a research project funded by the CNPq - Brazilian Research Agency ^? to develop solutions for WSNs).