Copyright © 2012 Chalermek Intanagonwiwat. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Wireless Networks of Embedded Systems (WNES) are notoriously difficult and tedious to program. The difficulty is mostly originated from low-level details in system and network programming. This includes distributedly managing and accessing resources from a dynamic set of nodes in hostile and volatile networks. To simplify WNES programming, we propose Declarative Resource Naming (DRN) that abstracts out the mentioned low-level details by programming a WNES in the large (i.e., macroprogramming). DRN provides programming simplicity, expressiveness, tunability, on-the-fly reprogrammability, and in-network data aggregation for energy savings. None of existing macroprogramming paradigms supports all of the mentioned features. Furthermore, DRN is an integration of declarative and imperative programming. The low-level details are declaratively abstracted out, but the main algorithm remains procedural. This allows programming simplicity without an adverse impact on the expressiveness. We have implemented and evaluated DRN on two platforms: Smart Message and Maté. Our result indicates that DRN enables programmers to develop energy-efficient applications with the desired flexibility and quality.