CSR--EHS--Environmentally Immersive Programming: A New Programming Paradigm for Deeply Embedded Systems

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

The main objective and intellectual merit of this project lies in developing a new paradigm and run-time system for distributed computing in sensor networks, called environmentally immersive programming. Environmentally immersive programming is an object-based paradigm that allows integration of objects that live in physical time and space as components in the computational environment of an application. A new middleware, called EnviroSuite, is built to demonstrate the first working environmentally immersive programming system. Geared for environmental monitoring applications, this programming system allows virtual objects to be dynamically instantiated and logically attached to selected external entities or conditions in the physical environment for monitoring purposes. Each such object encapsulates the monitored entity's aggregate state, performs entity-specific computation, and serves as the virtual communication port of the particular physical entity in the application programmer's world. An important part of the proposed work is to address the problem of unique representation of physical entities that are external to the computing system, but whose presence is inferred via sensory input. The complexity of this problem arises from the need to maintain consistency and persistent state in the face of external object movement, message loss and sensor false alarms. The utility of the middleware developed in this project is demonstrated on realistic sensor network testbed using current sensor node hardware.