ITR/SY: A Distributed Programming Infrastructure for Integrating Smart Sensors 1 Activities and Findings NSF Program CCR-0121638

The proposed research is integrating sensing hardware, embedded processing and distributed system support to build a seamless programming infrastructure for ubiquitous presence applications. Fundamental invention and integration of techniques spanning programming idioms [18, 2] and runtime systems for distributed sensors, and building blocks for embedded processing are expected as the primary intellectual contributions of the proposed research. Interfacing these technologies to emerging applications on the one end and novel off-the-shelf sensors at the other end are secondary goals of the proposed research. This subsection details the research accomplishments this past year (2003-04). 1.1.1 Distributed Systems Technologies Data Fusion Architecture. Simple in-network data aggregation (or fusion) techniques for sensor networks have been the focus of several recent research efforts, but they are insufficient to support advanced fusion applications. We extend these techniques to future sensor networks and ask two related questions: (a) what is the appropriate set of data fusion techniques, and (b) how do we dynamically assign aggregation roles to the nodes of a sensor network. We have developed an architectural framework, DFuse [9, 10], for answering these two questions. It consists of a data fusion API and a distributed algorithm for energy-aware role assignment. The fusion API enables an application to be specified as a coarse-grained dataflow graph