Flexible Sensor Network Reprogramming for Logistics

Besides the currently realized applications, Wireless Sensor Networks can be put to use in logistics processes. However, doing so requires a level of flexibility and safety not provided by the current WSN software platforms. This paper discusses a logistics scenario, and presents SensorScheme, a runtime environment used to realize this scenario, based on semantics of the Scheme programming language. SensorScheme is a general purpose WSN platform, providing dynamic reprogramming, memory safety (sandboxing), blocking I/O, marshalled communication, compact code transport. It improves on the state of the art by making better use of the little available memory, thereby providing greater capability in terms of program size and complexity. We illustrate the use of our platform with some application examples, and provide experimental results to show its compactness, speed of operation and energy efficiency

Testbed architecture and framework for debugging wireless sensor networks

The Internet of Things has emerged as one of the key aspects for the future of the Wireless Sensor Networks and their impact on new applications in real environments. This concept poses new challenges in the implementation, testing and debugging of efficient, robust and reliable technologies under this paradigm, specially in a pre-deployment stage where HW-SW platform prototypes are to be optimized prior to their inclusion in actual deployments. In this work, the design and implementation of a complete testbed infrastructure as a support tool for improving the effectiveness and the applicability of sensor nodes to real systems is presented, focused on the modular architecture of the Cookie platform and aiming to help developers to integrate and improve the whole WSN operation to final real-world scenarios

On-the-fly dynamic reprogramming mechanism for increasing the energy efficiency and supporting multi-experimental capabilities in WSNs

Remote reprogramming capabilities are one of the major concerns in WSN platforms due to the limitations and constraints that low power wireless nodes poses, especially when energy efficiency during the reprogramming process is a critical factor for extending the battery life of the devices. Moreover, WSNs are based on low-rate protocols in which as greater the amount of data is sent, the more the possibility to lose packets during the transmitting process is. In order to overcome these limitations, in this work a novel on-the-fly reprogramming technique for modifying and updating the application running on the wireless sensor nodes is designed and implemented, based on a partial reprogramming mechanism that significantly reduces the size of the files to be downloaded to the nodes, therefore diminishing their power/time consumption. This powerful mechanism also addresses multi-experimental capabilities because it provides the possibility to download, manage, test and debug multiple applications into the wireless nodes, based on a memory map segmentation of the core. Being an on-the-fly reprogramming process, no additional resources to store and download the configuration file are needed

Testbed infrastructure for debugging, analyzing and optimizing WSN nodes based on a modular HW-SW architecture

The Internet of Things has emerged as one of the key aspects to the future of the Wireless Sensor Networ ks and their impact in new applications in real environments. This concept poses new challenges in the implementation, testing and assessment of efficient, robust and reliable technologies and prototypes under this paradigm. In this way, the run-time remote interaction with the deployment of hundreds of in-f ield nodes in which developers have to be able to control and manage the wireless network anywhere at any time also implies new objectives to be achieved in order to adapt or even create new HW-SW platforms. In this work, the design and implementation of a complete testbed infrastructure as a support tool for improving the effectiveness and the applicability of sensor nodes to real applications is presented, focused on the m odular architecture of the Cookie hardware platform and aiming to help developers to integrate and optimize the whole WSN system to the final applications in the real world

Wireless Sensor Network Virtualization: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSN nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.Comment: Accepted for publication on 3rd March 2015 in forthcoming issue of IEEE Communication Surveys and Tutorials. This version has NOT been proof-read and may have some some inconsistencies. Please refer to final version published in IEEE Xplor

CERN Storage Systems for Large-Scale Wireless

The project aims at evaluating the use of CERN computing infrastructure for next generation sensor networks data analysis. The proposed system allows the simulation of a large-scale sensor array for traffic analysis, streaming data to CERN storage systems in an efficient way. The data are made available for offline and quasi-online analysis, enabling both long term planning and fast reaction on the environment

A Service-Oriented Operating System and an Application Development Infrastructure for Distributed Embedded Systems

The paradigm of service-orientation promises a significant ease of use in creating and managing distributed software systems. A very important aspect here is that also application domain experts and stakeholders, who are not necessarily skilled in computer programming, get a chance to create, analyze, and adapt distributed applications. However, up to now, service-oriented architectures have been mainly discussed in the context of complex business applications. In this paper we will investigate how to transfer the benefits of a service-oriented architecture into the field of embedded systems, so that this technology gets accessible to a much wider range of users. As an example, we will demonstrate this scheme for sensor network applications. In order to address the problem of limited device resources we will introduce a minimal operating system for such devices. It organizes all pieces of code running on a sensor node in a service-oriented fashion and also features the relocation of code to a different node at runtime. We will demonstrate that it is possible to design a sensor network application from a set of already existing services in a highly modular way by employing already existing technologies and standards

Wisent: Robust Downstream Communication and Storage for Computational RFIDs

Computational RFID (CRFID) devices are emerging platforms that can enable perennial computation and sensing by eliminating the need for batteries. Although much research has been devoted to improving upstream (CRFID to RFID reader) communication rates, the opposite direction has so far been neglected, presumably due to the difficulty of guaranteeing fast and error-free transfer amidst frequent power interruptions of CRFID. With growing interest in the market where CRFIDs are forever-embedded in many structures, it is necessary for this void to be filled. Therefore, we propose Wisent-a robust downstream communication protocol for CRFIDs that operates on top of the legacy UHF RFID communication protocol: EPC C1G2. The novelty of Wisent is its ability to adaptively change the frame length sent by the reader, based on the length throttling mechanism, to minimize the transfer times at varying channel conditions. We present an implementation of Wisent for the WISP 5 and an off-the-shelf RFID reader. Our experiments show that Wisent allows transfer up to 16 times faster than a baseline, non-adaptive shortest frame case, i.e. single word length, at sub-meter distance. As a case study, we show how Wisent enables wireless CRFID reprogramming, demonstrating the world's first wirelessly reprogrammable (software defined) CRFID.Comment: Accepted for Publication to IEEE INFOCOM 201

Towards a Versatile Problem Diagnosis Infrastructure for LargeWireless Sensor Networks

In this position paper, we address the issue of durable maintenance of a wireless sensor network, which will be crucial if the vision of large, long-lived sensornets is to become reality. Durable maintenance requires tools for diagnosing and fixing occurring problems, which can range from internode connectivity losses, to time synchronization problems, to software bugs. While there are solutions for fixing problems, an appropriate diagnostic infrastructure is essentially still lacking. We argue that diagnosing a sensornet application requires the ability to dynamically and temporarily extend the application on a selected group of nodes with virtually any functionality. We motivate this claim based on deployment experiences to date and propose a highly nonintrusive solution to dynamically extending a running application on a resource-constrained sensor node