Access Control Policy Composition Assistance in Sensor Network

To improve performance and reliability, nodes in sensor cloud applications can share data and other resources with others on demand. When doing so access should be restricted with Access Control Policies (ACP), allowing different levels of access to different applications and sensor nodes. Due to limited energy and storage capability of sensor nodes, there is a need to find new in-network access control protocols for reducing the power consumption. To increase a sensor node’s lifetime, its sphere of communication can be narrowed down to a limited number of nodes it can communicate based on some ACP. In sensor cloud, after a sensor node has generated some data, the node stores the data locally or at some designated nodes within the network. Since each node has a limited storage capacity, in our approach, we can allow the use of other sensors memory governed by the Access Control Policy so that the overall system performance can be improved. These access control policies can depend on some common characteristics (task, communication range, and time interval) between the two sensors. Enforcing dynamic access control is a particularly difficult task due to the limited computational capacity of wireless sensor nodes.