Fine-grained composition of distributed sensor system infrastructure

An important current trend in distributed systems is toward (1) wireless networking of large numbers of resource-constrained sensors and other devices, and (2) increasing demands on those networks as new and more sophisticated distributed applications are conceived for them. This trend presents a key challenge to developers of reusable system infrastructure for those networks: how to balance (1) the heterogeneous requirements of different applications, (2) inherent or induced resource constraints on the networked devices and their wireless connectivity, and (3) reusability of software modules in the distributed system infrastructure that mediates interactions between each application and the network resources. This paper presents an approach to system infrastructure for these kinds of systems, which is based on principled fine-grained composition of primitive system software modules, guided by system resource constraints and application resource requirements. We describe how our approach has been used in the domain of distributed real-time embedded system middleware, and discuss its applicability to other forms of distributed system infrastructure.