Declarative failure recovery for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a system of distributed sensors embedded in the physical world, and promise to allow observation of previously unobservable phenomena. Since they are exposed to unpredictable environments, sensor-network applications must handle a wide variety of faults: software errors, node and link failures, and network partitions. The code to manually detect and recover from faults crosscuts the entire application, is tedious to implement correctly and efficiently, and is fragile in the face of program modifications. We investigate language support for modularly managing faults. Our insight is that such support can be naturally provided as an extension to existing "macroprogramming" systems for sensor networks. In such a system, a programmer describes a sensor network application as a centralized program; a compiler then produces equivalent node-level programs. We describe a simple checkpoint API for macroprograms, which can be automatically implemente...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Ramakrishna Gummadi, Nupur Kothari, Todd D. Millstein, Ramesh Govindan
• Keywords: AOSD 2007, Sensor Network, Sensor Network Application, Software Engineering, Wireless Sensor Networks