A spreadsheet approach to programming and managing sensor networks

Alec Woo, Siddharth Seth, Tim Olson, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao

Abstract: We present a spreadsheet approach to simplifying the process of managing, programming, and interacting with sensor networks and visualizing, archiving and retrieving sensor data. An Excel spreadsheet prototype has been built to demonstrate the idea. This environment provides Excel users, who are already familiar with spreadsheet applications, a convenient and powerful tool for programming and data analysis. We discuss the architecture of this prototype and our experience in implementing the tool. We show two different classes of sensor-net applications built using this platform. We also present performance data on the scalability of the tool with respect to data rate and number of data streams.