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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in various application domains like home-automation, agriculture, industries and infrastructure monitoring. As applications tend to leverage larger geographical deployments of sensor networks, the availability of an intuitive and user friendly programming abstraction becomes a crucial factor in enabling faster and more efficient development, and reprogramming of applications. We propose a programming pattern named sMapReduce, inspired by the Google MapReduce framework, for mapping application behaviors on to a sensor network and enabling complex data aggregation. The proposed pattern requires a user to create a network-level application in two functions: sMap and Reduce, in order to abstract away from the low-level details without sacrificing the control to develop complex logic. Such a two-fold division of programming logic is a natural-fit to typical sensor networking operation which makes sensing and topological modalities accessible to the user.

There has been considerable interest in energy harvesting for wireless sensor networks. Energy harvesting from thermal sources such as body heat and mechanical sources such as human motion have been proposed. There are also sensor network systems that harvest energy from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, ambient light levels in indoor environments are typically significantly lower than those found outdoors and highly dependent on the nature of the indoor environment considered. Recently, low-power clock synchronization using electromagnetic energy radiating from AC power lines was proposed. In this paper, we go a step ahead and try to answer the question: Can energy be harvested from the electromagnetic energy radiating from AC power lines and use it to operate a wireless sensor network with a low duty-cycle? We find that such energy harvesting appears promising.

Clock synchronization is highly desirable in many sensor networking applications. It enables event ordering, coordinated actuation, energy-efficient communication and duty cycling. This paper presents a novel low-power hardware module for achieving global clock synchronization by tuning to the magnetic field radiating from existing AC power lines. This signal can be used as a global clock source for battery-operated sensor nodes to eliminate drift between nodes over time even when they are not passing messages. With this scheme, each receiver is frequency-locked with each other, but there is typically a phase-offset between them. Since these phase offsets tend to be constant, a higher-level compensation protocol can be used to globally synchronize a sensor network. We present the design of an LC tank receiver circuit tuned to the AC 60Hz signal which we call a Syntonistor. The Syntonistor incorporates a low-power microcontroller that filters the signal induced from AC power lines generating a pulse-per-second output for easy interfacing with sensor nodes. The hardware consumes less than 58μW which is 2--3 times lower than the idle state of most sensor networking MAC protocols. Next, we evaluate a software clock-recovery technique running on the local microcontroller that minimizes timing jitter and provides robustness to noise. Finally, we provide a protocol that sets a global notion of time by accounting for phase-offsets. We evaluate the synchronization accuracy and energy performance as compared to in-band message passing schemes. The use of out-of-band signals for clock synchronization has the useful property of decoupling the synchronization scheme from any particular MAC protocol. Our experiments show that over a 11 day period, eight nodes distributed across the floor of the CIC building on Carnegie Mellon's campus remained synchronized on an average to less than 1ms without exchanging any radio messages beyond the initialization phase.