TCMote: A Tuple Channel Coordination Model for Wireless Sensor Networks Manuel D´ ıaz, Bartolom´ e Rubio and Jos´ e M. Troya Dpto. Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computaci ´ on. M´ alaga University 29071 M´ alaga, SPAIN {mdr,tolo,troya}@lcc.uma.es Abstract Wireless sensor networks are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. Sensor nodes must carry out a coordinated cooperative effort in or- der to transmit the required data. This paper introduces TCMote, a new coordination model to facilitate applica- tion development over ad hoc sensor networks. Our pro- posal is based on a (hierarchical) architecture of sensor regions and the use of tuple channels to model communica- tion and synchronization among sensors. A tuple channel is a FIFO structure that allows data structures to be commu- nicated both in an one-to-many and many-to-one way, fa- cilitating the data-centric behavior of sensor queries. The characteristics of TCMote and the primitives that it of- fers for its integration into a computational host lan- guage are presented. keywords. Wireless Sensor Networks, Coordination Paradigm, Coordination Models and Languages, Coordi- nation Middleware. 1. Introduction Wireless sensor networks constitute a new pervasive technology. Due to a combination of advances in electron- ics, nanotechnology, wireless communications, computing, networking, and robotics, it is now possible to design ad- vanced sensors and sensor systems that can be used for var- ious application areas: environmental monitoring; objects and events detection; military surveillance; precision agri- culture; transportation [1]. A sensor network consists of (potentially) thousands of tiny, low-cost and low-power nodes, colloquially referred to as “motes”, that interact with their environment through sensors, actuators and communication. Sensor nodes must carry out a coordinated cooperative effort in order to trans- mit the required and partially processed data [7]. These coordination needs has attracted the coordination paradigm community attention. Coordination models and languages facilitate application development by providing high-level constructs such as tuple spaces, blackboards, and channels, and they have been successfully applied to a wide range of application areas: open systems [11], interactive web environments [2], scientific computation [6], just to mention some of them. Recently, different approaches are coming to the sensor network area [8] [4], most of them based on principles of Linda [10], which is historically the first genuine member of the family of coordination lan- guages and is based on a shared multiset of tuples referred to as tuple space. This paper presents TCMote, a new high-level coordina- tion model based on tuple channels to facilitate application development over wireless sensor networks. Our reference operational setting is first described. It is based on a (hierar- chical) architecture of sensor regions, each one governed by a leader with higher capabilities (power, memory, process- ing ability) than the rest of the region nodes (motes). The leader manages both internal and external communications. Besides the deployment of new motes, these can move in- side a region or even shift region, reconfiguring the system in order to get a better performance. A region leader owns a tuple channel space, which stores tuple channels used to carried out communication and syn- chronization between region sensors and the leader in a single-hop way. Tuple channels are based on and simplify those introduced in TCM [5], a previous coordination model for parallel and distributed programming. A TCMote tuple channel is a FIFO structure that allows one-to-many and many-to-one communication of data structures, represented by tuples. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Sec- tion 2 the reference operational setting is described. Sec- tion 3 presents the TCMote model, including its main de- sign goals, concepts and primitives. Finally, some conclu- sions and future work are sketched in Section 4.