CoMET: Compressing Microcontroller Execution Traces to Assist System Understanding

Recent technology advances have made possible the retrieval of execution traces on microcontrollers. However, even after a short execution time of the embedded program, the collected execution trace contains a huge amount of data. This is due to the cyclic nature of embedded programs. The huge amount of data makes extremely difficult and time-consuming the understanding of the program behavior. Software engineers need a way to get a quick understanding of execution traces. In this paper, we present an approach based on an improvement of the Sequitur algorithm to compress large execution traces of microcontrollers. By leveraging both cycles and repetitions present in such execution traces, our approach offers a compact and accurate compression of execution traces. This compression may be used by software engineers to understand the behavior of the system, for instance, identifying cycles that appears most often in the trace or comparing different cycles. Our evaluations give two major results. On one hand our approach gives high compression rate on microcontroller execution traces. On the other hand software engineers mostly agree that generated outputs (compressions) may help reviewing and understanding execution traces

CoMET: Compressing Microcontroller Execution Traces to Assist System Understanding

Les rapports de recherche du LIG - ISSN: 2105-0422Recent technology advances have made possible the retrieval of execution traces on microcontrollers. However, even after a short execution time of the embedded program, the collected execution trace contains a huge amount of data. This is due to the cyclic nature of embedded programs. The huge amount of data makes extremely difficult and time-consuming the understanding of the program behavior. Software engineers need a way to get a quick understanding of execution traces. In this paper, we present an approach based on an improvement of the Sequitur algorithm to compress large execution traces of microcontrollers. By leveraging both cycles and repetitions present in such execution traces, our approach offers a compact and accurate compression of execution traces. This compression may be used by software engineers to understand the behavior of the system, for instance, identifying cycles that appears most often in the trace or comparing different cycles. Our evaluations give two major results. On one hand our approach gives high compression rate on microcontroller execution traces. On the other hand software engineers mostly agree that generated outputs (compressions) may help reviewing and understanding execution traces

Connectivity in Multi-Channel Multi-Interface Wireless Mesh Networks

Session: Wireless Mesh Networks (Wireless Networking Symposium)International audienceWe can improve the performance of wireless mesh networks by using multiple interfaces tuned to non-overlapping channels. A Channel and Interface Assignment (CIA) decides when to switch interfaces and which channel to use. Surprisingly, the impact of CIAs on connectivity has received little attention so far. In this paper, we present a comparison and performance evaluation of the existing CIA strategies addressing the connectivity issues: network topology, density of connections, and neighbor discovery. The results presented in this paper provide guidelines for network designers in planning multi-channel multi-interface network deployments