Ruling Networks with RDL: A Domain-Specific Language to Task Wireless Sensor Networks

Events are a fundamental concept in computer science with decades of research contributing to enable precise specification and efficient processing. New as well as evolving application domains nevertheless call for adaptation of successful concepts to meet intrinsic challenges provided by the target environment. A representative of such a new area for application are wireless sensor networks, pushing the need for event handling onto the bare metal of embedded devices. In this paper, we motivate the deployment of reactive rules in wireless sensor networks and describe our rule-based language RDL. Since our goal is to provide a high level of abstraction for node-level tasking, we will especially focus on recent additions to the language that support modularity to achieve a better encapsulation of concerns.