DAIS: Enabling Declarative Applications in Immersive Sensor Networks

As sensor networks become increasingly ubiquitous, we envision an instrumented environment that can provide varying amounts of information to mobile applications immersed within the network. Such a scenario deviates from existing deployments of sensor networks which are often highly application-specific and generally funnel information to a central collection service for a single purpose. Instead, we target future scenarios in which multiple mobile applications will leverage sensor network nodes opportunistically and unpredictably. This paper introduces the DAIS (Declarative Applications in Immersive Sensor networks) middleware platform that enables the development of these adaptive mobile applications. Our approach focuses on minimizing communication in the sensor network to best ensure the network’s lifetime. DAIS localizes data collection and sensor interaction to only the regions of the network required for the applications’ immediate data needs. At the programming interface level, this requires exposing some aspects of the physical world to the developer, and DAIS accomplishes this through a novel programming abstraction that enables on-demand access to dynamic data sources. This paper reports on our initial work with the DAIS middleware platform and highlights both the programming interface and its interaction with the necessary underlying communication constructs.