Programming Wireless Sensor Networks with the TeenyLimeMiddleware

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are evolving to support sense-and-react applications, where actuators are physically interspersed with the sensors that trigger them. This solution maximizes localized interactions, improving resource utilization and reducing latency w.r.t. solutions with a centralized sink. Nevertheless, application development becomes more complex: the control logic must be embedded in the network, and coordination among multiple tasks is needed to achieve the application goals. This paper presents TeenyLime, a WSN middleware designed to address the above challenges. TeenyLime provides programmers with the high-level abstraction of a tuple space, enabling data sharing among neighboring devices. These and other WSN-specific constructs simplify the development of a wide range of applications, including sense-and-react ones. TeenyLime yields simpler, cleaner, and more reusable implementations, at the cost of only a very limited decrease in performance. We support these claims through a source-level, quantitative comparison between implementations based on TeenyLime and on mainstream approaches, and by analyzing measures of processing overhead and power consumption obtained through cycle-accurate emulation.