Logical Neighborhoods for WSN: Best Demo at SenSys 2007

A common scenario for WSN often feature masters or base stations in charge of coordinating the application functionality. Although this centralized approach is appropriate for some applications, there are other situations in which distributed control and processing is necessary to implement more complex control loops. The generalized Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN) is the scope researchers are now exploring to come up with more decentralized architectures that encompass multiple sinks and heterogeneous nodes. In such settings, new programming abstractions are required to manage complexity and heterogeneity without sacrificing efficiency.

Logical Neighborhoods (LN) is a novel programming abstraction for WSNs. A logical neighborhood includes nodes whose dependable roles in the network are specified declaratively, along with requirements about the cost of the communication involved, and regardless of the physical neighbors related to the node’s radio range. This enable the programmer to slice the network according to the application needs, effectively replacing the physical neighborhood with a higher-level, application-defined notion of proximity.

Late last year, at the flagship conference on wireless sensor networks: ACM SenSys 07 held in Sydney, Australia, Luca Mottola and G.P. Picco received the Best Demo Award for the demo “Programming WSN with Logical Neighborhoods: A Road Tunnel Use Case”.
The original LN papers can be found here and here.

Further info is available on the dedicated Web site.