EnviroSuite: An Environmental 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 towards developing large-scale applications. Traditional programming languages as well as their sensor network adaptations are too low-level. Their basic computation, communication and actuation unit is typically the sensor node.
Programmers must think in terms of single node activities and explicitly encode interactions among nodes. The project is targeted for a new programming paradigm which exports high-level abstractions for programming-in-the-large.

The main objective and intellectual merit of the project lies in developing EnviroSuite, a programming framework that introduces a new paradigm, called environmentally immersive programming (EIP) to abstract distributed interactions with the environment. It maintains a logical address space in which individual addressable entities can be either logical objects, developed by the application programmer or (representations of) physical elements in the external environment. The two types are seamlessly integrated, can communicate, and are able to invoke each other's methods. They allow the programmers to think directly in terms of environmental abstractions. The main contributions of the work include:
 
- Designing language primitives for environmentally immersive programming and implementing a preprocessor to transparently map such language primitives into a support library of distributed algorithms;

- Developing the support library, including object management algorithms to support object abstractions, and storage systems for EnviroSuite to store object states in the network;

- Applying and evaluating the framework in multiple real applications.