Dynamic TinyOS: Modular and transparent incremental code-updates for sensor networks

Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Date Issued
2010-05
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Munawar, Waqaas  
Alizai, Muhammad Hamad  
Landsiedel, Olaf  
Wehrle, Klaus  
TORE-URI
https://hdl.handle.net/11420/53942
Article Number
5501964
Citation
IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2010: 5501964
Contribution to Conference
IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2010  
Publisher DOI
10.1109/ICC.2010.5501964
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-77955358856
Publisher
IEEE
ISSN
05361486
ISBN
978-1-4244-6402-9
978-1-4244-6404-3
Long-term deployments of sensor networks in physically inaccessible environments make remote re-programmability of sensor nodes a necessity. Ranging from full image replacement to virtual machines, a variety of mechanisms exist today to deploy new software or to fix bugs in deployed systems. However, TinyOS - the current state of the art sensor node operating system - is still limited to full image replacement as nodes execute a statically-linked system-image generated at compilation time. In this paper we introduce Dynamic TinyOS to enable the dynamic exchange of software components and thus incrementally update the operating system and its applications. The core idea is to preserve the modularity of TinyOS, i.e. its componentization, which is lost during the normal compilation process, and enable runtime composition of TinyOS components on the sensor node. The proposed solution integrates seamlessly into the system architecture of TinyOS: It does not require any changes to the programming model of TinyOS and existing components can be reused transparently. Our evaluation shows that Dynamic TinyOS incurs a low performance overhead while keeping a smaller - up to one third - memory footprint than other comparable solutions.
DDC Class
600: Technology