LA-TinyOS: a locality-aware operating system for wireless sensor networks

A number of WSN (wireless sensor networks) applications have been deployed to monitor the environment periodically and identify anomalous events. Anomalous events occur rarely. However, when an anomaly event occurs, it often carries temporal and spatial locality. Observations of such events are improved by reducing the period of monitoring to increase the frequency. A task is said to be locality-aware if it supports temporal and spatial locality to automatically adjust its monitoring period. This work implements Locality-Aware TinyOS or LA-TinyOS as the first locality-aware WSN operating system. With locality-aware features embedded in a kernel component, LA-TinyOS provides a reliable and efficient framework for developing locality-aware applications. The novel LA-TinyOS has significantly (more than 80%) reduce the lines of user code to perform such a task, than does TinyOS. Finally, we use LA-TinyOS to develop a locality-aware monitoring application using two dozen micaZ sensors. This system is currently deployed in the reading room of public library at our university to record noise violation events.