Future large-scale sensor network deployments will be tiered, with the motes providing dense sensing and a higher tier of 32-bit master nodes with more powerful radios providing increased overall network capacity. In this paper, we describe a functional architecture for wireless sensor networks that leverages this structure to simplify the overall system. Our Tenet architecture has the nice property that the mote-layer software is generic and reusable, and all application functionality resides in masters.