Title: A New Era of Resource Responsibility for Sensor Networks

Abstract:
 
Sensor networks have taken off, but they are still notoriously difficult to
program. Our group has deployed sensor networks for volcano monitoring and
rehabilitation medicine, and each time we find that tuning the network to
achieve the right tradeoff in terms of data quality, battery lifetime, and
bandwidth usage is quite painful. To make things worse, resource
availability fluctuates over time, as does the load that the application
places on those resources. The severely constrained and decentralized nature
of sensor networks makes this problem fairly challenging.

In this talk, I will argue that the software for sensor networks should be
designed around the fundamental abstraction of resource-aware programming.
In this model, the application has direct visibility and control over resources 
as a first-class primitive. This requires the application code to take 
responsibility for its own resource management decisions, since it cannot 
expect a "bailout" from the OS. This approach enables much more effective 
adaptations to changing conditions, and supports a rich space of resource-management
policies.

In this talk, I will present three related systems that leverage this
approach: Pixie, a new sensor node operating system; Lance, a network-wide
resource management plane; and Mercury, a platform for maximizing data
quality in a wearable sensor network. I will present examples and
evaluations based on our real-world deployments.

Bio:

Matt Welsh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University, where he has been on the faculty since 2003. His research
interests span many aspects of distributed systems, operating systems, and
programming languages. His current focus is on wireless sensor networks
including new OS and language designs to enable efficient, high-data-rate
applications. Prior to joining Harvard, he spent one year at Intel Research,
Berkeley. He completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and his B.S. at Cornell
University.