The combination of recent technological advances in electronics, nanotechnology, wireless communications, computing, networking, and robotics has enabled the development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a new form of distributed computing where sensors (tiny, low-cost and low-power nodes, colloquially referred to as “motes”) deployed in the environment communicate wirelessly to gather and report information about physical phenomena. WSNs have been successfully used for various application areas, such as envi- ronmental monitoring, object and event detection, military surveillance, and precision agriculture.
A variation of WSNs that is rapidly attracting interest among researchers and practitioners is the so called Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs). In this case, the devices deployed in the environment are not only sensors able to sense environmental data, but also actors able to react by affecting the environment. Actors are resource rich nodes equipped with better processing capabilities, higher transmission power and longer battery life than sensors. The coordination needs present at WSNs and WSANs have attracted the coordination paradigm community attention. Coordination models and languages facilitate parallel and distributed application by separating computational and coordination aspects and providing high-level constructs such as tuple spaces, blackboards, and channels. They have been successfully applied to a wide range of application areas such as open systems, interactive web environments and scientific computation.

Recently, different coordination approaches have come to the WSNs and WSANs area. Most of them are thought to support an abstract model based on a shared memory model where data is represented by elementary data structures called tuples. Coordination among processes occurs through the writing, reading and removing of tuples.

Our approach, however, is based on the use of tuple channels instead of tuple spaces to carry out communication and synchronization among the involved nodes.

This work is fully supported by the spanish project called Desarrollo de Software para Redes Inalámbricas de Sensores y Actores (P07-TIC-03085)