Enabling Scoping in Sensor Network Macroprogramming

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly employed to develop sophisticated applications beyond simple data gathering. In these scenarios, heterogeneous nodes are deployed, and multiple parallel activities must be performed to achieve the application goals. Therefore, application developers require the ability to partition the system based on the node characteristics, and specify the interactions between different partitions to implement the processing germane to different activities. Node-level programming abstractions for sensor networks have already tackled this problem by providing a notion of scoping. However, the level of abstraction achieved is still not suited to implementing non-trivial, large-scale applications. In this paper we demonstrate how the aforementioned issue can be addressed by enabling scoping concepts in macroprogramming for sensor networks. Using macroprogramming, developers reason at a higher level of abstraction, focusing on the behavior to be achieved by the system as a whole. By enabling scoping in macroprogramming, they can capture the essence of a significant class of distributed, embedded applications in a very concise manner. This extremely simplifies the development process, and increases the maintainability and re-usability of the resulting implementations.