EnviroSuite: An Environmentally Immersive Programming Framework for Sensor Networks

Sensor networks open a new frontier for embedded-distributed computing. Paradigms for sensor network programming-in-the-large have been identified as a significant challenge toward developing large-scale applications. Classical programming languages are too low-level. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of EnviroSuite, a programming framework that introduces a new paradigm, called environmentally immersive programming, to abstract distributed interactions with the environment. Environmentally immersive programming refers to an object-based programming model in which individual objects represent physical elements in the external environment. It allows the programmer to think directly in terms of environmental abstractions. EnviroSuite provides language primitives for environmentally immersive programming that map transparently into a support library of distributed algorithms for tracking and environmental monitoring. We show how nesC code of realistic applications is significantly simplified using EnviroSuite and demonstrate the resulting system performance on Mica2 and XSM platforms.