Over the last five years, sensor network research has seen significant advances in the development of hardware devices and platforms, and in the design of services and infrastructural elements such as routing, localization, and time synchronization. Deployed systems, however, have lagged behind. In this poster, we will describe an alternative architecture, called Tenet, for sensor networks that constrains placement of application-specific functionality on relatively unconstrained nodes. We will then briefly describe our experiences with an early prototype system built on this architecture.