Macro-programming for Wireless Sensor Networks

This project targets to overcome the difficulties associated with WSN programming by introducing the right abstraction models and tools to program WSN at the global, network level, not at the currently-practiced node level.

This kind of programming dubbed “macro-programming” by the WSN research community will help describe the global desired behaviour of the system along with high level restrictions on metrics such as energy consumption, delay, accuracy, and robustness, and automatically produce node-level code to be executed at individual sensor nodes.

 

What will the project achieve? 

By providing the right tools and abstractions the embedded nature of the programming is eliminated and many distributed computing problems greatly alleviated. Most importantly, the application developer will focus mainly on the application at hand (e.g., how the state of the estimated information changes according to new sensor readings) and less on distributed computing problems such as communication patterns, race conditions and code deployment. The management of the code will be greatly facilitated too as the automatically produced node level code fragments will be dynamically and autonomously deployed into the network.

 

Who will benefit? 

The success of this project will have a significant impact on the sensor network community as it will help move these systems towards realisation. Application developers will use the tools and abstractions produced by this project to create efficient, robust applications fast and without needing extensive knowledge of the embedded or networking details of WSN.

 

Look also at:

Castalia: A simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks

A new simulator with more accurate channel/radio modeling was needed in order to test communication ideas in macro-programming.  We built an expandable simulator, modeling several WSN aspects that are usually neglected and made it available to teh research community.

 

Contact

Athanassios Boulis (project leader): [firstname].[lastname]@nicta.com.au

 

Publications

  • H. P. Ngoc, D. Pediaditakis, and A. Boulis, “From Simulation to Real Deployments in WSN and Back,” The 1st IEEE International Workshop From Theory To Practice in Wireless Sensor Networks (t2pWSN'2007), Helsinki, Finland, June 18, 2007


  • D. Pediaditakis, S. H. Mohajerani, and A. Boulis, “Poster Abstract: Castalia: the Difference of Accurate Simulation in WSN,” The 4th European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, (EWSN 2007), Delft, The Netherlands, January 29-31, 2007