Hood: a neighborhood abstraction for sensor networks

This paper proposes a neighborhood programming abstraction for sensor networks, wherein a node can identify a subset of nodes around it by a variety of criteria and share state with those nodes. This abstraction allows developers to design distributed algorithms in terms of the neighborhood abstraction itself, instead of decomposing them into component parts such as messaging protocols, data caches, and neighbor lists. In those applications that are already neighborhood-based, this abstraction is shown to facilitate good application design and to reduce algorithmic complexity, inter-component coupling, and total lines of code. The abstraction as defined here has been successfully used to implement several complex applications and is shown to capture the essence of many more existing distributed sensor network algorithms.