A relaxed synchronization primitive for macroprogramming systems

Abstract

Abstract-Some sensor networks have large, non-deterministic communication delays which can be problematic because nodes must decide how long to wait before acting. A conflict arises when deciding on how much information is necessary: waiting a long time will improve accuracy but is detrimental to timeliness and acting quickly will improve timeliness but worsen accuracy. We present a relaxed barrier synchronization primitive that allows the programmer to make this tradeoff. A key challenge of a relaxed barrier is correctly setting exit conditions. For example, the number of nodes, radius of influence, and deadline can be adjusted to ensure the proper tradeoff between timeliness and accuracy. We provide a solution for discovering these values that combines both simulation and hill climbing. We show that by utilizing our primitive, application accuracy can be improved and maintained for many different scenario variations.

Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling

“…(Sookoor, 2009) "Macroprogramming provides the user with the illusion of programming a single machine by abstracting away the low-level details of message passing and distributed computation." (Hnat and Whitehouse, 2010) "Macroprogramming systems addresses the difficult problem of how to program a system of devices to perform a global task without forcing the programmer to develop device-specific implementations" (Pathak and Prasanna, 2011) "In macroprogramming, abstractions are provided to specify the high-level collaborative behavior at the system level, while intentionally hiding most of the low-level details concerning state maintenance or message passing from the programmer" (Martins and McCann, 2017) " [...] the behavior of a CPS is better understood at a global system level. In order to reflect this from a programming language abstraction standpoint we rely on network-wide programming, or macroprogramming [...] This paradigm of programming allows the system developer to write one piece of code for the network, specifying the application at a global semantic level.…”