A Network API-Driven Survey of Communication Requirements of Distributed Data Processing Algorithms for Sensor Networks Raymond Wagner 1 , Marco Duarte, J. Ryan Stinnett T.S. Eugene Ng, David B. Johnson, Richard Baraniuk Technical Report, Rice University, Houston, TX November, 2006 In [105], we present the design of a sensor network application program- ming interface (API) to cover the common communication requirements of data processing applications in sensor networks, motivated by a study of all such applications proposed to date in the proceedings of Information Pro- cessing in Sensor Networks (IPSN). Due to space limitations, only a subset of the more than 100 papers surveyed are discussed in [105]. In this technical report, we present the full results of the survey. To compile these results, we examined each paper proposing some sort of signal processing on data gathered by the sensor network, identifying the node-to-node communication patterns laid out by the authors. In all cases, we took great care to make as few assumptions as possible about the authors’ intent; thus, only papers in which the required patterns are clearly speciﬁed appear in this survey. A great deal of commonality can be found across the diversity of appli- cations, and the destinations for node-to-node sending fall into three main camps: (1) address-based sending, where the target is speciﬁed as a single address or list of addresses, (2) region-based sending, where the targets are speciﬁed to lie in some region centered around the sending node or some arbitrary point in space, and (3) hierarchical sending, where the targets are speciﬁed as parents or children of the sending node based on associations between more- and less-powerful classes of devices. Each sending mode im- plies a reciprocal receiving mode for the target of the send; in addition, a subset of papers also employ eavesdropping receiving modes where a node which is not the intended destination of a message transmitted by nodes in its vicinity receives and examines the contents of the message. We now present each API call, as proposed in [105], along with the list of references in which an instance of the associated communication pattern 1 Email: rwagner@rice.edu Web: http://www.ece.rice.edu/ ∼ rwagner 1