The Omni Macroprogramming Environment for Sensor Networks

Structural sensing and control is an important application of the DDDAS paradigm. Our work on structural sensing and control has several key aspects, including model reduction, control, simulation, and validation. Motivated by our work on validation using an actual three-storeyed structure, we are developing a comprehensive systems environment, Omni, for macroprogramming sensor networks. While there have been efforts targeted at enabling programmers to write lean applications for individual sensor nodes, there have been few efforts targeted towards allowing programmers to program entire networks as distributed ensembles. Omni provides an intuitive and efficient programming interface, along with operating system services for mapping these abstractions into the underlying network. In this paper, we provide a high-level overview of the Omni architecture, its salient features, and implementation details. The Omni architecture is designed to be a flexible, extensible, scalable, and portable system, upon which a wide variety of DDDAS applications can be built.