Today I read a paper entitled Data-Centric Storage in Sensornets. It suggested a way in which distributed hashtables could be used on top of a geographic routing protocol (GRPS) in sensor networks to make more efficient use of bandwidth and lower energy consumption. This work is quite interesting, and relevant in terms of my own work. If nothing else, it has provided legitimacy for one of the scenarios I invented for my service discovery protocol. Namely, there are applications in which notifications are produced by the sensors at frequent intervals. These notifications can be thought of as resource descriptions which can be stored and queried. One of my protocols, Superstring, performs best relative to other protocols when the average time between advertisements is less than the average time between queries. The applications described in this paper would seem to match that profile exactly.
But other than reading the paper, I didn’t get much done. I spent a long while helping a student build SFSnet under Solaris without much luck. I really need to get on with my Ph.D and finish writing this paper with Ted. But Ted is understandably very busy at the moment. Honestly, I just need to complete my model for service discovery and then implement a prototype. There are a few issues I’m still to sort out. The main ones are scoping advertisements and queries, and heterogeneity. The latter also involves figuring out how to add the concept of peer-groups to DHTs, or from another point of view, how to merge one group of devices with another in a scalable fashion. Think about a sensor network which is linked to a wired network such as the Internet. Is it sensible to make the two sets of devices (sensors in the sensor network and computers on the Internet) part of the same flat routing space? As I see it, these are the two problems I have left to solve before I can start implementing a prototype.
I’ve been listening to an album by the Australian hip-hop group The Herd quite a bit recently. It’s called An Elefant Never Forgets. I’ve grown away from hip-hop in recent years, but The Herd is definitely growing on me. The background melodies are pretty funky, and each track has a different sound. The lyrical sound is not that great (somehow the Aussie accent just doesn’t quite do it for me), but the lyrics themselves are politically charged and deal with contemporary Australian issues, which suits the hip-hop genre to a tea. I still pull out the Warren G on occassion too. But boy it feels like ages since hip-hop was the sound for me, and the baggy red 3/4 shorts and the ill-fitting cricket hat were the clothes for me. I guess it has been over five years since first/second year uni :). Maybe I’ll pull out the old get-up one of these days for old time’s sake. The UQ bucket hat I’ve got now is a nice replacement for the fake bucket hat (the tight cricket hat that looked like a bucket hat ;) that I used to wear. Then again, perhaps it would be best to leave that stuff in the closet. Yes. But they were good times. Not good times academically, perhaps, but good times nevertheless.
