Macro-programming wireless sensor networks using Kairos

Abstract

The literature on programming sensor networks has focused so far on providing higher-level abstractions for expressing local node behavior. Kairos is a natural next step in sensor network programming in that it allows the programmer to express, in a centralized fashion, the desired global behavior of a distributed computation on the entire sensor network. Kairos' compile-time and runtime subsystems expose a small set of programming primitives, while hiding from the programmer the details of distributed-code generation and instantiation, remote data access and management, and inter-node program flow coordination. In this paper, we describe Kairos' programming model, and demonstrate its suitability, through actual implementation, for a variety of distributed programs - both infrastructure services and signal processing tasks - typically encountered in sensor network literature: routing tree construction, localization, and object tracking. Our experimental results suggest that Kairos does not adversely affect the performance or accuracy of distributed programs, while our implementation experiences suggest that it greatly raises the level of abstraction presented to the programmer. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.