EnviroTrack: Towards an Environmental Computing Paradigm for Distributed Sensor Networks

T. Abdelzaher, B. Blum B, Q. Cao, Y. Chen, D. Evans, J. George, S. George, L. Gu, T. He, S. Krishnamurthy, L. Luo, S. Son, J. Stankovic, R. Stoleru and A. Wood. The 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. Tokyo, Japan. March 23-26, 2004.

Abstract Distributed sensor networks are quickly gaining recognition as viable embedded computing platforms. Current techniques for programming sensor networks are cumbersome, inflexible, and low-level. This paper introduces EnviroTrack, an object-based distributed middleware system that raises the level of programming abstraction by providing a convenient and powerful interface to the application developer geared towards tracking the physical environment. EnviroTrack is novel in its seamless integration of objects that live in physical time and space into the computational environment of the application. Performance results demonstrate the ability of the middleware to track realistic targets.

Keywords: sensor networks, programming paradigms, tracking, QoS, distributed systems

Complete Paper (8 pages) [PDF].