Reliable and efficient programming abstractions for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

It is currently difficult to build practical and reliable programming systems out of distributed and resource-constrained sensor devices. The state of the art in today’s sensornet programming is centered around a component-based language called nesC. nesC is a nodelevel language—a program is written for an individual node in the network—and nesC programs use the services of an operating system called TinyOS. We are pursuing an approach to programming sensor networks that significantly raises the level of abstraction over this practice. The critical change is one of perspective: rather than writing programs from the point of view of an individual node, programmers implement a central program that conceptually has access to the entire network. This approach pushes to the compiler the task of producing node-level programs that implement the desired behavior. We present the Pleiades programming language, its compiler