Design and Implementation of a Mobile Actor Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) promise the ability to monitor physical environments and to facilitate control of cyber-physical systems. Because sensors networks can generate large amounts of data, and wireless bandwidth is both limited and energy hungry, local processing becomes necessary to minimize communication. However, for reasons of energy efficiency and production costs, embedded nodes have relatively slow processors and small memories. This makes programming sensor networks harder and requires new tools for distributed computing. We have developed ActorNet, an implementation of the Actor model of computing for sensor networks which facilitates programming by treating a sensor network as an open distributed computing platform. ActorNet provides a high-level actor programming language: users can write dynamic applications for a single cross-platform runtime environment with support for heterogeneous and physically separated WSNs. This shields application developers from some hardware-specific concerns. Moreover, unlike other programming systems for WSNs, ActorNet supports agent mobility and automatic garbage collection. We describe the ActorNet language and runtime system and how it achieves reasonable performance in a WSN.

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