EnviroSuite: An Environmentally-Immersive Programming Framework for Sensor Networks

March 12, 2007
Liqian Luo | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This talk describes EnviroSuite: a sensor-network programming framework that introduces a new paradigm, called environmentally-immersive programming (EIP), to significantly simplify the development of environmental monitoring and tracking applications. Traditional distributed computing paradigms are geared towards abstracting distributed communication. In contrast, in sensor networks, it is desired to abstract distributed interaction with the physical world. EnviroSuite creates a logical address space in which individual addressable entities can be either logical objects, developed by the application programmer or (representations of) physical elements in the external environment. The two types are seamlessly integrated, can communicate, and are able to invoke each other’s methods. They allow the programmers to think directly in terms of physical objects and environmental events of interests rather than individual behaviors of network nodes. Several sample applications built upon EnviroSuite are evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and flexibility of the framework. EnviroSuite was included in graduate seminars at Berkeley, Stanford, UIUC, the University of Virginia, Washington University, Freie Universitat Berli, and Politecnico di Milano, among others.

Speaker Details

Liqian Luo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Professor Tarek Abdelzaher. She received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2004 and her B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in 2000. Her primary research interests are in the areas of sensor networks, distributed embedded systems, wireless/mobile communication, and ubiquitous computing. Liqian is the developer of EnviroSuite, a sensor networks programming language that implements Environmentally-Immersive Programming. She is a Vodafone Graduate Fellow and the recipient of the UIUC Distinguished Networking and Systems Student Award. She is also one of the primary developers of VigilNet, an integrated sensor network system for surveillance applications that was recently classified and transitioned to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).