Compiling functional reactive macroprograms for sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks present a number of novel programming challenges for application developers. Their inherent limitations of computational power, communication bandwidth, and energy demand new approaches to programming that shield the developer from low-level details of resource management, concurrency, and in-network processing. To answer this challenge, this thesis presents a functional macroprogramming language called Regiment. The essential data model in Regiment is based on regions, which represent spatially distributed, time-varying collections of state. The programmer uses regions to define and manipulate dynamic sets of sensor nodes. A first compiler for Regiment has been constructed, which implements the essential core of the language on the TinyOS platform. This thesis presents the compiler as well as an intermediate language developed to serve as a Regiment compilation target.