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NSDI '04 — Abstract
Pp. 29–42 of the Proceedings
Programming Sensor Networks Using Abstract Regions
Matt Welsh and Geoff Mainland, Harvard University
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks are attracting increased interest for a wide
range of applications, such as environmental monitoring and vehicle
tracking. However, developing sensor network applications is notoriously
difficult, due to extreme resource limitations of nodes, the
unreliability of radio communication, and the necessity of low power
operation. Our goal is to simplify application design by providing a set of
programming primitives for sensor networks that abstract the details of
low-level communication, data sharing, and collective operations.
We present abstract regions, a family of spatial operators
that capture local communication within regions of the network, which
may be defined
in terms of radio connectivity, geographic location, or other properties
of nodes. Regions provide interfaces for identifying neighboring nodes,
sharing data among neighbors, and performing efficient reductions on
shared variables. In addition, abstract regions expose the tradeoff between
the accuracy and resource usage of communication operations.
Applications can adapt to changing network conditions by tuning the energy
and bandwidth usage of the underlying communication substrate.
We present the implementation of abstract regions in the TinyOS
programming environment, as well as results demonstrating their use
for building adaptive sensor network applications.
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