Matt Welsh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, lectures on resource aware programming. Sensor networks have taken off, though tuning them to achieve good resource efficiency is difficult. His has deployed sensor networks for volcano monitoring and rehabilitation medicine, and each time they find that tuning parameters to achieve the right tradeoff in terms of data quality, battery lifetime, and bandwidth usage is quite painful. To make things worse, resource availability fluctuates over time, as does the load that the application places on those resources. The severely constrained and decentralized nature of sensor networks makes this problem fairly challenging.
In this talk, Welsh argues that the software for sensor networks should be designed around the fundamental abstraction of resource-aware programming. In this model, the application has direct visibility and control over resources as a first-class primitive. This requires the application code to take responsibility for its own resource management decisions, since it cannot expect a "bailout" from the OS. This approach enables much more effective adaptations to changing conditions, and supports a rich space of resource-management policies.
In this talk, Welsh presents three related systems that leverage this approach: Pixie, a new sensor node operating system; Lance, a network-wide resource management plane; and Mercury, a platform for maximizing data quality in a wearable sensor network. He presents examples and evaluations based on our real-world deployments.
