Environmentally Immersive Programming: A Distributed Computing Paradigm for Sensor Networks

Tarek Abdelzaher

Friday, April 23, 2004
10:00am - SENSQ 5317

(Refreshments at 9:30am in SENSQ 5319)

Abstract

This talk describes environmentally immersive programming; a new sensor-network programming paradigm that significantly simplifies the development of environmental monitoring and tracking applications. Traditional distributed computing paradigms are geared towards abstracting distributed communication. In contrast, in sensor networks, it is desired to abstract distributed interaction with the physical world. Environmentally immersive programming systems create a logical address space in which individual addressable entities can be either logical objects, developed by the application programmer or (representations of) physical objects in the external environment. The two types are seamlessly integrated, can communicate, and are able to invoke each other's methods. The motivation is to abstract away monitoring tasks and simplify interactions with the external physical environment. Our middleware service realizes the environmentally immersive programming paradigm. It provides its own friendly user interface: the EIP language. Several sample applications built upon our EIP middleware using this interface are evaluated. Results demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of the middleware.