The UBIQUEST project proposes to combine the network management and data management in a single framework. Our objective is to design a query language for ad hoc networks and to develop the distributed query evaluation techniques that will efficiently compute queries expressed in this language. The network is essentially hidden and perceived by each node as a database, with which it interacts through declarative expressions. The communication between nodes thus consists of queries, updates and data. Each node is equipped with a local database system, an hybrid router, and a distributed query engine, processing queries posed by the node itself or received from other nodes. All the exchanges between nodes whether related to communication protocols, to resource discovery, to any aspects of the application layers will be done through queries, which blurs the traditional distinction between communication and application layers.

It is reasonable to expect that the UBIQUEST framework will be efficient in the evaluation of specific class of queries and inefficient for some others. Even if the query evaluation techniques are not so efficient, the framework will at least offer a nice approach for the rapid development and easy deployment of network management tasks and applications. Another possible roadblock of the UBIQUEST project is that for the networks with constrained terminals (e.g., wireless sensor networks) the developed software developed in this project might be too large be tuned to the terminals. Therefore, adaptability, modularity and reconfigurability are important properties considered in the development of the framework.