TCMote: a tuple channel coordination model for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. Sensor nodes must carry out a coordinated cooperative effort in order to transmit the required data. This paper introduces TCMote, a new coordination model to facilitate application development over ad hoc sensor networks. Our proposal is based on a (hierarchical) architecture of sensor regions and the use of tuple channels to model communication and synchronization among sensors. A tuple channel is a FIFO structure that allows data structures to be communicated both in an one-to-many and many-to-one way, facilitating the data-centric behavior of sensor queries. The characteristics of TCMote and the primitives that it offers for its integration into a computational host language are presented.