With sensor networks starting to get mainstream acceptance, programmability is of increasing importance.
Customers and field engineers will need to reprogram existing deployments and software developers
will need to test and debug software in network testbeds. Script languages, which are a popular
mechanism for reprogramming in general-purpose computing, have not been considered for wireless sensor
networks because of the perceived overhead of interpreting a script language on tiny sensor nodes.
In this paper we show that a structured script language is both feasible and efficient for programming
tiny sensor nodes. We present a structured script language, SCript, and develop an interpreter for the
language. To reduce program distribution energy the SCript interpreter stores a tokenized representation
of the scripts which is distributed through the wireless network. The ROM and RAM footprint of the
interpreter is similar to that of existing virtual machines for sensor networks. We show that the interpretation
overhead of our language is on par with that of existing virtual machines. Thus script languages,
previously considered as too expensive for tiny sensor nodes, are a viable alternative to virtual machines