Context-Oriented Programming for Adaptive Wireless Sensor Network Software Mikhail Afanasov

Abstract—We present programming abstractions for imple-menting adaptive Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) software. The need for adaptability arises in WSNs because of unpredictable environment dynamics, changing requirements, and resource scarcity. However, after about a decade of research in WSN programming, developers are still left with no dedicated support. To address this issue, we bring concepts from Context-Oriented Programming (COP) down to WSN devices. Contexts model the situations that WSN software needs to adapt to. Using COP, programmers use a notion of layered function to implement context-dependent behavioral variations of WSN code. To this end, we provide language-independent design concepts to organize the context-dependent WSN operating modes, decoupling the ab-stractions from their concrete implementation in a programming language. Our own implementation, called CONESC, extends nesC with COP constructs. Based on three representative applica-tions, we show that CONESC greatly simplifies the resulting code and yields increasingly decoupled implementations compared to nesC. For example, by model-checking every function in either implementations, we show a ≈50 % reduction in the number of program states that programmers need to deal with, indicating easier debugging. In our tests, this comes at the price of a maximum 2.5 % (4.5%) overhead in program (data) memory. I