TinyDebug: Multi-Purpose Passive Debugging Framework for Embedded Wireless Systems

Debugging embedded wireless systems can be cumbersome due to low visibility. To ease the task of debugging this paper present TinyDebug which is a multi-purpose passive debugging framework for developing embedded wireless sys- tems. TinyDebug is designed to be used throughout the entire system development process, ranging from simulation to actual deployment. TinyDebug provides out-of-the-box message oriented debugging and event logging mechanism while enabling more advanced debugging techniques to pro- cess the same debug events. We present the TinyDebug framework with all its features from event logging to extraction and show how the frame- work improves upon existing message based and event log- ging debugging techniques while enabling distributed event processing. We also present a number of optional event anal- ysis tools demo

SensLAB Very Large Scale Open Wireless Sensor Network Testbed

International audienceThis paper presents a precise description of SensLAB: Very Large Scale Open Wireless Sensor Network Testbed that has been developed and deployed in order to allow the evaluation of scalable wireless sensor network protocols and applications. SensLAB's main and most important goal is to o er an accurate open access multi-users scienti c tool to support the design, development, tuning, and experimentation of real large-scale sensor network applications. The SensLAB testbed is composed of 1024 nodes and it is distributed among 4 sites. Two sites o er access to mobile nodes. Every sensor node is also able to be con gured as a sink node and can exchange data with any other sink node of the whole SensLAB testbed (locally or remotely) or any computer on the Internet. The hardware designed on purpose and software architectures that allow to reserve, con gure, deploy embedded software, boot wireless sensor nodes and gather experimental data and monitoring information are described in details. We also present short demonstration examples to illustrate the use of the SensLAB testbed

Development of mobile agent framework in wireless sensor networks for multi-sensor collaborative processing

Recent advances in processor, memory and radio technology have enabled production of tiny, low-power, low-cost sensor nodes capable of sensing, communication and computation. Although a single node is resource constrained with limited power, limited computation and limited communication bandwidth, these nodes deployed in large number form a new type of network called the wireless sensor network (WSN). One of the challenges brought by WSNs is an efficient computing paradigm to support the distributed nature of the applications built on these networks considering the resource limitations of the sensor nodes. Collaborative processing between multiple sensor nodes is essential to generate fault-tolerant, reliable information from the densely-spatial sensing phenomenon. The typical model used in distributed computing is the client/server model. However, this computing model is not appropriate in the context of sensor networks. This thesis develops an energy-efficient, scalable and real-time computing model for collaborative processing in sensor networks called the mobile agent computing paradigm. In this paradigm, instead of each sensor node sending data or result to a central server which is typical in the client/server model, the information processing code is moved to the nodes using mobile agents. These agents carry the execution code and migrate from one node to another integrating result at each node. This thesis develops the mobile agent framework on top of an energy-efficient routing protocol called directed diffusion. The mobile agent framework described has been mapped to collaborative target classification application. This application has been tested in three field demos conducted at Twentynine palms, CA; BAE Austin, TX; and BBN Waltham, MA

A game-based approach to the teaching of object-oriented programming languages

Students often have difficulties when trying to understand the concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP). This paper presents a contribution to the teaching of OOP languages through a game-oriented approach based on the interaction with tangible user interfaces (TUIs). The use of a specific type of commercial distributed TUI (Sifteo cubes), in which several small physical devices have sensing, wireless communication and user-directed output capabilities, is applied to the teaching of the C# programming language, since the operation of these devices can be controlled by user programs written in C#. For our experiment, we selected a sample of students with a sufficient knowledge about procedural programming, which was divided into two groups: The first one had a standard introductory C# course, whereas the second one had an experimental C# course that included, in addition to the contents of the previous one, two demonstration programs that illustrated some OOP basic concepts using the TUI features. Finally, both groups completed two tests: a multiple-choice exam for evaluating the acquisition of basic OOP concepts and a C# programming exercise. The analysis of the results from the tests indicates that the group of students that attended the course including the TUI demos showed a higher interest level (i.e. they felt more motivated) during the course exposition than the one that attended the standard introductory C# course. Furthermore, the students from the experimental group achieved an overall better mark. Therefore, we can conclude that the technological contribution of Sifteo cubes – used as a distributed TUI by which OOP basic concepts are represented in a tangible and a visible way – to the teaching of the C# language has a positive influence on the learning of this language and such basic concepts

Envirosuite: An Environmentally-Immersive Programming Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Networked, embedded sensors allow for an instrumentation of the physical world at unprecedented granularities and from unimagined perspectives. The advent of a ubiquitous sensing era is evident. Yet, sensor network techniques are still far from entering mainstream adoption due to multiple unresolved research challenges, especially due to the high development cost of sensor network applications. Therefore, in this dissertation, we propose to design, implement, and evaluate an environmentally-immersive programming framework, called EnviroSuite, to reduce sensor network software development cost. The goal of our research is to create reusable sensor network development support for the community and reduce the adoption barriers for a broader category of users, ultimately leading to a transition of sensor networks from a research concept to a general-purpose technology available for use for a wide variety of research, government, industry, and everyday purposes. Current sensor network programming practice remains very cumbersome and inefficient for several reasons. First, most existing programming abstractions for sensor networks are either too low-level (thus too tedious and error-prone) or too high-level (unable to support the diversity of sensor network applications). Second, there is no clear separation between application-level programming and system-level programming. A significant concern is the lack of a general middleware library to isolate application developers from low-level details. Finally, testing sensor network systems is particularly challenging. Sensor systems interact heavily with a (non-repeatable) physical environment, making lab experiments not representative and on-site experiments very costly. This dissertation is targeted for a comprehensive solution that addresses all the above-mentioned problems. The EnviroSuite framework consists of (i) a new programming paradigm that exports environment-based abstractions, (ii) critical middleware services that support the abstractions and separate application programmers from tedious, low-level details, and (iii) testing tools geared for in-situ experimenting, debugging, and troubleshooting. First, we introduce a new programming paradigm, called environmentally-immersive programming (EIP), to capture the common characteristics of sensor network applications, the rich, distributed interactions with the physical environment. EIP refers to an object-based programming model in which individual objects represent physical elements in the external environment. It allows the programmer to think directly in terms of physical objects or events of interest. We provide language primitives for programmers to easily implement their environmental tracking and monitoring applications in EIP. A preprocessor translates such EIP code transparently into a library of support middleware services, central to which are object management algorithms, responsible for maintaining a unique mapping between physical and logical objects. The major outcome of sensor networks is observations of the instrumented environment, in other words, sensory data. Implementing an application mainly involves encoding how to generate, store, and collect such data. EIP object abstractions provide simple means for programmers to define how observations of the environment should be made via distributed coordination among multiple nodes, thus simplifying data generation. Yet, the next steps, namely, data storage and collection, remain complicated and fastidious. To isolate programmers from such concerns, we also include in the support library a set of data management services, comprising both network protocols and storage systems to allow data to be collected either in real-time or in a delay-tolerant manner. The final phase in sensor network software development life-cycle is testing, typically performed in-field, where the effects of environmental realities can be studied. However, physical events from the dynamic environment are normally asynchronous and non-repeatable. This lack of repeatability makes the last phase particularly difficult and costly. Hence, it is essential to have the capability to capture and replay sensing events, providing a basis not only for software testing, but also for realistic protocol comparison and parameter tuning. To achieve that, EnviroSuite also provides testing and debugging facilities that enable controllable and repeatable in-field experiments. Finally, to demonstrate the benefits of our framework, we build multiple representative applications upon EnviroSuite, drawn from both tracking systems such as military surveillance, and monitoring systems such as environmental acoustic monitoring. We install these applications into off-the-shelf hardware platforms and physically deploy the hardware into realistic environments. Empirical results collected from such deployments demonstrate the efficacy of EnviroSuite

Intermittent Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

The maturation of energy-harvesting technology and ultra-low-power computer systems has led to the advent of intermittently-powered, batteryless devices that operate entirely using energy extracted from their environment. Intermittently operating devices present a rich vein of programming languages research challenges and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate these challenges to the PL research community. To provide depth, this paper includes a survey of the hardware and software design space of intermittent computing platforms. On the foundation of these research challenges and the state of the art in intermittent hardware and software, this paper describes several future PL research directions, emphasizing a connection between intermittence, distributed computing, energy-aware programming and compilation, and approximate computing. We illustrate these connections with a discussion of our ongoing work on programming for intermittence, and on building and simulating intermittent distributed systems

Recent Advances in Declarative Networking

Declarative networking is a programming methodology that enables developers to concisely specify network protocols and services, and directly compile these specifications into a dataflow framework for execution. This paper describes recent advances in declarative networking, tracing its evolution from a rapid prototyping framework towards a platform that serves as an important bridge connecting formal theories for reasoning about protocol correctness and actual implementations. In particular, the paper focuses on the use of declarative networking for addressing four main challenges in the distributed systems development cycle: the generation of safe routing implementations, debugging, security and privacy, and optimizing distributed systems

Programming platform for distributed robotics: primitives and portability

The Stabilizing Robotics Language (StarL) programming framework aims to simplify development of distributed robotic applications by providing programming abstractions and building blocks for communication, motion control and coordination between robots. It has been used to develop applications such as formation control, automatic intersection protocol, and distributed collaborative search. In this thesis, we introduce the programming abstractions as StarL primitives that are platform independent and useful across hardware platforms, resulting in portability. We first introduce the primitives as building blocks to easily develop, simulate and debug distributed robotic applications in StarL. Then, we discuss the design of the StarL framework which enables us to achieve portability of robot programs across hardware platforms. Thus, the same application program, say, for formation control, can now be ported and deployed on multiple, heterogeneous robotic platforms. We evaluate the design of these new features by simulating several applications

Highway construction in Wireless Sensor Networks

English: Wireless sensor networks are a rapidly growing field of study with many open research topics. The aim of this project is to build a hierarchy of clusters in wireless sensor networks and to communicate them through distinguished paths. Those paths are known as highways, and simplify higher level node inter-communication while reducing energy and memory requirements. To achieve this goal several distributed algorithms were designed and tested either in simulators or in real hardware. The message delivery rate, through highways, measured in hardware was close to 70\% and it effectively served as base for a higher level network module to make end to end communication between every node of the connected network. This opens a way for the development of more algorithms to make wireless sensor networks communications on large deployments effective and trouble less

Smart Phone Based Mobile Code Dissemination for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being widely used in various outdoor applications including environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and smart cities. WSN is a distributed network of sensor devices where the software running on the sensor devices defines how the devices should operate. In real-world WSN deployments, sensor node's software update is required to fix bugs and maintain optimal operation. In this paper, we present a novel mobile code dissemination tool based on smart phone running on Android Operating System for heterogeneous WSN reprogramming. Our implementation builds upon Mobile Deluge with new enhancements and more convenient mobile code dissemination tool in practice. We have evaluated our application performance on Android platform, and validated our mobile tool with a real-world outdoor low-power heterogeneous WSN deployment, demonstrating its practical merit