A File System Abstraction for Sense and Respond Systems

The heterogeneity and resource constraints of sense-and-respond systems significantly challenge system and application development. In this paper, we present a flexible, intuitive file system abstraction for organizing and managing sense-and-respond systems based on the Plan 9 design principles. A key feature is the support of multiple views of the system via filesystem namespaces. Constructed logical views present an application-specific representation of the network, thus enabling high-level programming. Concurrently, structural views of the network enable resource-efficient planning and execution of tasks. We present and motivate the design using several examples, outline research challenges and our plan to address them, and describe the current implementation state.