HealthRTA
A common vision of the future is one where our everyday environments are replete with wireless sensing devices networked to form complicated systems of systems. These systems will need to exist for many years, and operate in the context of real world communication, sensing, and failure realities. Many of the systems will be unattended (at least for large periods of time) and often performing very important tasks. The current rapid development and deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their application in mission critical systems are exacerbating the need for high confidence WSNs.
Achieving high confidence WSNs will require new assurance technologies both off-line and on-line. For off-line solutions we expect to utilize formal methods and new analysis techniques. However, even when the off-line solutions are effective, there will still be a great need for run time assurance technologies because these systems operate in the noisy, error-prone physical world. Most of the current on-line solutions deal with faults and reliability and not with application level semantics and associated assurances. Our system uses a novel WSN design and assurance mechanism, run time assurance (RTA), to guarantee that important application-level requirements are met in mission critical applications.
The main contribution of this work is determining how to specify and support at run time a collection of solutions that enable WSNs to improve confidence and demonstrate application operability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the confidence issue of WSNs at the application semantics level and provides comprehensive solutions for RTA.