Programming Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks with TC-WSANs

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) constitute a new pervasive technology and currently one of the most interesting fields of research. WSANs have two major challenges: coordination mechanisms for both sensor-actor and actor-actor interactions, and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. This paper introduces a middleware architecture that address these two requirements and facilitate the application programmer task. Our proposal supports a high-level coordination model that is based on the use of tuple channels to achieve communication and synchronization among the nodes. A tuple channel is a priority queue structure that allows data structures to be communicated both in a one-to-many and many-to-one way, facilitating the data-centric behavior of sensor queries. The main characteristics of the model and the different components forming the middleware are presented. In addition, some implementation details and preliminary results of the current prototype are described.