Logical Neighborhoods: A Programming Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) typically exploit a single base station for collecting data and coordinating activities. However, decentralized architectures are rapidly emerging, as witnessed by wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), and in general by solutions involving multiple data sinks, heterogeneous nodes, and in-network coordination. These settings demand new programming abstractions to tame complexity without sacrificing efficiency. In this work we introduce the notion of logical neighborhood, which replaces the physical neighborhood provided by wireless broadcast with a higher-level, application-defined notion of proximity. The span of a logical neighborhood is specified declaratively based on the characteristics of nodes, along with requirements about communication costs. This paper presents the SPIDEY programming language for defining logical neighborhoods, and a routing strategy that efficiently supports the communication enabled by its programming constructs.