High-level construction of emergent self-organizing behavior in massively distributed embedded systems

Nowadays, a range of applications and systems are emerging that consist of hundreds or thousands of computing devices, which are available at low cost but severely limited in their resources. A proper orchestration of these elements can yield a powerful system, which performs complex tasks, while staying simple and making efficient use of its resources. Designing such systems is a challenging task. The classical approach is to develop them in an ad hoc manner, which does not fully leverage the potential of these systems and is far from what can be achieved. There are methodologies which try to overcome this challenge but they do not address essential issues. Moreover, most of them do not provide a design environment to support the design process. In this paper, we propose a new methodology and design environment for systematic construction of emergent behavior in large-scale distributed embedded systems which address issues at both micro- and macroscopic layer. Our approach and simulator were successfully used to design emergent clustering and data collection in large scale wireless sensor networks.