Spatial coordination in wireless sensor network applications

Abstract

In distributed systems, dependency among different computations of an application leads to a problem of deciding the locations of computations. Spatial requirements of a computation can be expressed in terms of spatial relationships with other computations. This research presents programming abstractions and language constructs which can be used for specifying spatial coordination requirements for distributed computations. A spatial coordination middleware has been implemented for satisfying spatial coordination requirements of systems implemented using the Actor model of concurrent computation. Our approach abstracts spatial requirements of concurrent computations and provides key programming primitives for specifying these requirements. We have also implemented a number of higher level spatial coordination primitives which can be translated into the basic primitives. Spatial requirements can be specified using these primitives and then the runtime system converts them into a constraint satisfaction problem and satisfies them. Our approach reduces the programming complexity and provides a middleware which separates spatial requirements from functional code and enables the application programmer to change spatial requirements at runtime without effecting application's functionality. We have identified some of the high level primitives and provided a mechanism to develop high level primitives on top of the basic primitives.

This thesis presents the rationale, design, implementation, and evaluation of spatial coordination. By comparing programs written with and without our spatial coordination primitives, we show how spatial coordination enables a programmer to specify spatial requirements declaratively and simplify the programming task. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the approach, as the number of constraints increases.