Enabling Scoping in Sensor Network Macroprogramming ∗

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly employed to deve lop sophisticated applications beyond simple data gathering. In these scenarios, heterogeneous nodes are deployed, and multiple parallel activitiesmust be performed to achieve the application goals. Therefore, application d evelopers require the ability to partition the systembased on the node characteristics, and specify the interactions b etween different partitions to implement the processing germane to different activities. Node-level programming abstractions for sensor networks h ave already tackled this problem by providing a notion of scoping. However, the level of abstraction achieved is still not sui ed to implementing non-trivial, large-scale applications. In this paper we demonstrate how the aforemen tioned issue can be addressed by enabling scoping conceptsin macroprogrammingfor sensor networks. Using macroprogramming, developers r ea on at a higher level of abstraction, focusing on the behavior to be achieved by the s ystem as a whole. By enabling scoping in macroprogramming, they can capture the essence of a significant class of di tributed, embedded applications in a very concise manner. This extremely simplifies the development process, and increases the maintainability and re-usability of the resulting implementations.