CrimeSPOT: A language and runtime for developing active wireless sensor network applications

Advances in wireless sensing and actuation technology allow embedding significant amounts of application logic inside wireless sensor networks. Such active WSN applications are more autonomous, but are significantly more complex to implement. Event-based middleware lends itself to implementing these applications. It offers developers fine-grained control over how an individual node interacts with the other nodes of the network. However, this control comes at the cost of event handlers which lack composability and violate software engineering principles such as separation of concerns. In this paper, we present CrimeSPOT as a domain-specific language for programming WSN applications on top of event-driven middleware. Its node-centric features enable programming a node’s interactions through declarative rules rather than event handlers. Its network-centric features support reusing code within and among WSN applications. Unique to CrimeSPOT is its support for associating application-specific semantics with events that carry sensor readings. These preclude transposing existing approaches that address the shortcomings of event-based middleware to the domain of wireless sensor networks. We provide a comprehensive overview of the language and the implementation of its accompanying runtime. The latter comprises several extensions to the Rete forward chaining algorithm. We evaluate the expressiveness of the language and the overhead of its runtime using small, but representative active WSN applications.     

嵌入式系统平台抽象层设计与接口实现

近年来,随着嵌入式计算机技术飞速发展,各种异构嵌入式硬件不断更新,提高操作系统的可移植性和应用程序的代码重用性成为了一种趋势.本文设计了一种通用性较强的平台抽象层,针对Linux操作系统、“锐华”操作系统与硬件平台的应用程序开发接口重新进行设计,为用户开发各种嵌入式应用程序提供标准化的接口.研究证明,平台抽象层能提高操作系统的可移植性和应用程序的代码重用性,同时具有可靠的实时性.     

A software engineering approach for the development of heterogeneous robotic applications

One of the most evident characteristics of robotic applications is heterogeneity: large robotic projects involve many different researchers with very different programming needs and areas of research, using a variety of hardware and software that must be integrated efficiently (i.e.: with a low development cost) to construct applications that satisfy not only classic robotic requirements (fault-tolerance, real-time specifications, intensive access to hardware, etc.) but also software engineering aspects (reusability, maintainability, etc.). Most existing solutions to this problem either do not deal with such heterogeneity or do not cover specific robotic needs. In this paper we propose a framework for the integration of heterogeneous robotic software through a software engineering approach: the BABEL development system, which is aimed to cover the main phases of the application lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, and maintainance) when unavoidable heterogeneity conditions are present. The capabilities of our system are shown by its support for designing and implementing diverse real robotic applications that use several programming languages (C, C++, JAVA), execution platforms (RT-operating systems, MS-Windows, no operating system at all), communication middleware (CORBA, TCP/IP, USB), and also a variety of hardware components (Personal Computers, microcontrollers, and a wide diversity of sensor and actuator devices in mobile robots and manipulator arms).     

A multicast reprogramming protocol for wireless sensor networks based on small world concepts

Automatic reprogramming is an important and challenging issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A usual approach is the over-the-air programming (OAP), which is a fundamental service based on reliable broadcast for efficient code dissemination. However, existing OAP protocols do not enable the reprogramming of a subset of the sensor nodes in a WSN. Hence, in this work we propose a multicast-based over-the-air programming protocol that considers a small world infrastructure (MOAP-SW). The small world model is used to create shortcuts toward the sink in the communication infrastructure of sensor networks. The endpoints of these shortcuts are more powerful nodes, resulting in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network. Simulation results show the feasibility of the protocol regarding the number of messages transmitted, the energy consumption and the time to reconfigure the network.     

无线传感器网络中间件研究进展

无线传感器网络作为一种新兴的技术,受到了学术界和工业界的广泛关注.然而随着传感器网络及其应用的发展,系统的复杂性也随之增加,与传统网络相比无限传感器网络又具有其独特的特征,使得无线传感器网络的程序开发变得更加困难.中间件提供了一个编程抽象,方便了应用程序的开发,缩减了应用程序和底层设备的间隙.针对无线传感器网络的特点,分析了无线传感器网络中间件设计面临的问题,对有关设计方法进行了分类评述,并对几种典型中间件进行了比较,最后从通信范式、QoS支持和安全等方面提出了一些改进思路.     

Curracurrong: a stream programming environment for wireless sensor networks

The technological advances in wireless sensor network (WSN) enable the development of complex applications including health monitoring, environmental sampling, and disaster area monitoring. WSN applications deploy battery‐powered sensors at remote locations for long periods. The development of energy‐efficient and complex WSN applications therefore requires in‐depth embedded systems programming skills that are normally not found in domain experts. So that this challenge can be overcome, programming environments for WSN need to offer a high degree of productivity, flexibility, and efficiency at the same time. In this work, we present Curracurrong, a development environment for WSNs that is based on expressing queries with stream programming. A query is represented as a stream graph consisting of stream operators and communication channels. Curracurrong provides an extensible stream operator library that adapts to a wide range of applications. It uses a novel placement algorithm that optimizes the energy consumption on sensor nodes. Through a case study, we demonstrate the productivity and flexibility of our system. We conduct experiments that evaluate the energy efficiency of our optimized operator placement algorithm. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

传感器网络中能量最优化的聚类轮换算法

针对无线传感器网络节点能量难以补充,如何延长网络使用寿命的问题,将网络工作过程描述为不定阶段动态规划问题,结合总能量守恒关系推导出网络寿命上下界,提出能量优先的聚类轮换策略并证明了其最优性．在此基础上,设计了实用性好的最小切换聚类轮换算法（SSLL）,利用PowerTOSSIM仿真验证了SSLL取得接近最优的网络寿命．     

MobileFBP: Designing portable reconfigurable applications for heterogeneous systems

Power-efficiency has been a key issue for today’s application and system design, ranging from embedded systems to data centers. While application-specific designs and optimizations may improve the power efficiency, it requires significant efforts to co-design the hardware and software, which are difficult to re-use. On the hardware front, the trend of heterogeneous computing enables custom designs for specific applications by integrating different types of processors and reconfigurable hardware to handle compute-intensive tasks. However, what is still missing is an elegant application framework, i.e., a programming environment and a runtime system, to develop portable applications which can offload tasks or be reconfigured dynamically to run on a variety of systems efficiently.Our ongoing work, MobileFBP, provides an application framework which aims to support heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems. Using the framework, the developers build portable applications with a dataflow programming paradigm, and the MobileFBP runtime system dynamically schedules the task components to run on available computing resources locally or remotely based on the application profiles. We hope that this ability produces high-level portable applications and reduces the efforts and skills needed for the developers to optimize their applications on a range of systems. This paper describes this work and presents our preliminary results.     

State-centric programming for sensor-actuator network systems

Distributed embedded systems such as wireless sensor and actuator networks require new programming models and software tools to support the rapid design and prototyping of sensing and control applications. Unlike centralized platforms and Web-based distributed systems, these distributed sensor-actuator network (DSAN) systems are characterized by a massive number of potentially failing nodes, limited energy and bandwidth resources, and the need to rapidly respond to sensor input. We describe a state-centric, agent-based design methodology to mediate between a system developer's mental model of physical phenomena and the distributed execution of DSAN applications. Building on the ideas of data-centric networking, sensor databases, and proximity-based group formation, we introduce the notion of collaboration groups, which abstracts common patterns in application-specific communication and resource allocation. Using a distributed tracking application with sensor networks, we'll demonstrate how state-centric programming can raise the abstraction level for application developers.     

Efficient allocation of resources in multiple heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are useful for a wide range of applications, from different domains. Recently, new features and design trends have emerged in the WSN field, making those networks appealing not only to the scientific community but also to the industry. One such trend is the running different applications on heterogeneous sensor nodes deployed in multiple WSNs in order to better exploit the expensive physical network infrastructure. Another trend deals with the capability of accessing sensor generated data from the Web, fitting WSNs in novel paradigms of Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT). Using well-known and broadly accepted Web standards and protocols enables the interoperation of heterogeneous WSNs and the integration of their data with other Web resources, in order to provide the final user with value-added information and applications. Such emergent scenarios where multiple networks and applications interoperate to meet high level requirements of the user will pose several changes in the design and execution of WSN systems. One of these challenges regards the fact that applications will probably compete for the resources offered by the underlying sensor nodes through the Web. Thus, it is crucial to design mechanisms that effectively and dynamically coordinate the sharing of the available resources to optimize resource utilization while meeting application requirements. However, it is likely that Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applications cannot be simultaneously met, while efficiently sharing the scarce networks resources, thus bringing the need of managing an inherent tradeoff. In this paper, we argue that a middleware platform is required to manage heterogeneous WSNs and efficiently share their resources while satisfying user needs in the emergent scenarios of WoT. Such middleware should provide several services to control running application as well as to distribute and coordinate nodes in the execution of submitted sensing tasks in an energy-efficient and QoS-enabled way. As part of the middleware provided services we present the Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous WSNs (SACHSEN) algorithm. SACHSEN is a new resource allocation heuristic for systems composed of heterogeneous WSNs that effectively deals with the tradeoff between possibly conflicting QoS requirements and exploits heterogeneity of multiple WSNs.     

SPINE: a domain‐specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) enable a broad range of applications for continuous and real‐time health monitoring and medical assistance. Programming WBSN applications is a complex task especially due to the limitation of resources of typical hardware platforms and to the lack of suitable software abstractions. In this paper, SPINE (signal processing in‐node environment), a domain‐specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications, which is lightweight and flexible enough to be easily customized to fit particular application‐specific needs, is presented. The architecture of SPINE has two main components: one implemented on the node coordinating the WBSN and one on the nodes with sensors. The former is based on a Java application, which allows to configure and manage the network and implements the classification functions that are too heavy to be implemented on the sensor nodes. The latter supports sensing, computing and data transmission operations through a set of libraries, protocols and utility functions that are currently implemented for TinyOS platforms. SPINE allows evaluating different architectural choices and deciding how to distribute signal processing and classification functions over the nodes of the network. Finally, this paper describes an activity monitoring application and presents the benefits of using the SPINE framework. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于Q学习和规划的传感器节点任务调度算法*

为了改善节点的学习策略,提高节点的应用性能,以数据收集为应用建立任务模型,提出基于Q学习和规划的传感器节点任务调度算法,包括定义状态空间、延迟回报、探索和利用策略等基本元素.根据无线传感器网络(WSN)特性,建立基于优先级机制和过期机制的规划过程,使节点可以有效利用经验知识,改善学习策略.实验表明,文中算法具备根据当前WSN环境进行动态任务调度的能力.相比其它任务调度算法,文中算法能量消耗合理且获得较好的应用性能.     

Resource prioritization of code optimization techniques for program synthesis of wireless sensor network applications

Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications sense events in situ and compute results in-network. Their software components should run on platforms with stringent constraints on node resources. To meet these constraints, developers often design their programs by trial-and-error. Such manual process is time-consuming and error-prone.Based on an existing task view that treats a WSN application as tasks and models resources as constraints, we propose a new component view that associates components with code optimization techniques and constraints. We provide a visualization mechanism to help developers select code optimization techniques. We also develop algorithms to synthesize components running on nodes, fulfilling the constraints, and thus optimizing their quality.     

面向无线传感器网络应用的嵌入式操作系统综述

相比一般的嵌入式系统,无线传感器网络节点对操作系统的体积大小﹑能量利用率﹑节点相互间通信以及可重配置﹑可靠性和适应性等方面提出了更高的要求.由于这些特点,针对无线传感器网络节点也出现了各种各样的操作系统.阐述了无线传感器网络的特点及其对操作系统的要求,并介绍了当前无线传感器网络领域所应用的几种操作系统,提出了零操作系统的概念,也对传感器网络操作系统的版权进行了一些讨论,最后对传感器网络操作系统当前现状及发展作了总结.     

Energy‐efficient task allocation with quality of service provisioning for concurrent applications in multi‐functional wireless sensor network systems

Multi‐functional wireless sensor network (WSN) system is a new design trend of WSNs, which are evolving from dedicated application‐specific systems to an integrated infrastructure that supports the execution of multiple concurrent applications. Such system offers inherent advantages in terms of cost and flexibility because it allows the effective utilization of available sensors and resource sharing among multiple applications. However, sensor nodes are very constrained in resources, mainly regarding their energy. Therefore, the usage of such resources needs to be carefully managed, and the sharing with several applications imposes new challenges in achieving energy efficiency in these networks. In order to exploit the full potential of multi‐functional WSN systems, it is crucial to design mechanisms that effectively allocate tasks onto sensors so that the entire system lifetime is maximized while meeting various application requirements. However, it is likely that the requirements of different applications cannot be simultaneously met. In this paper, we present the Multi‐Application Requirements Aware and Energy Efficiency algorithm as a new resource allocation heuristic for multi‐functional WSN system to maximize system lifetime subject to various application requirements. The heuristic effectively deals with different quality of service parameters (possibly conflicting) trading those parameters and exploiting heterogeneity of multiple WSNs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A framework for Resource-Aware Data Accumulation in sparse wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an enabling technology for a wide range of applications. In contrast with traditional scenarios where static sensor nodes are densely deployed, a sparse WSN architecture can also be used in many cases. In a sparse WSN, special mobile data collectors (MDCs) are used to gather data from ordinary sensor nodes. In general, sensor nodes do not know when they will be in contact with the MDC, hence they need to discover its presence in their communication range. To this end, discovery mechanisms based on periodic listening and a duty-cycle have shown to be effective in reducing the energy consumption of sensor nodes. However, if not properly tuned, such mechanisms can hinder the data collection process. In this paper, we introduce a Resource-Aware Data Accumulation (RADA), a novel and lightweight framework which allows nodes to learn the MDC arrival pattern, and tune the discovery duty-cycle accordingly. Furthermore, RADA is able to adapt to changes in the operating conditions, and is capable of effectively supporting a number of different MDC mobility patterns. Simulation results show that our solution obtains a higher discovery efficiency and a lower energy consumption than comparable schemes.     

无线传感器网络数据融合技术

数据融合技术是无线传感器网络的一个关键技术,能减少传感器节点间的传输量,从而明显提高网络感知效能,延长网络生命周期,减小时间延迟。通过对尚处于研究阶段的数据融合技术进行详细分析与研究,阐述了数据融合技术的重要性,并分类介绍了现有的主要数据融合方法,最后指出该研究领域当前面临的挑战以及需要进一步研究的方向和有前景的研究课题——压缩感知。     

OpenCL performance portability for general‐purpose computation on graphics processor units: an exploration on cryptographic primitives

The modern trend toward heterogeneous many‐core architectures has led to high architectural diversity in both high performance and high‐end embedded systems. To effectively exploit the computational resources of such a wide range of architectures, programming languages and APIs such as OpenCL have become increasingly popular. Although OpenCL provides functional code portability and the ability to fine tune the application to the target hardware, providing performance portability is still an open problem. Thus, many research works have investigated the optimization of specific combinations of application and target platform. In this paper, we aim at leveraging the experience obtained in the implementation of algorithms from the cryptography domain to provide a set of guidelines for modern many‐core heterogeneous architecture performance portability and to establish a base on which domain‐specific languages and compiler transformations could be built in the near future. We study algorithmic choices and the effect of compiler transformations on three representative applications in the chosen domain on a set of seven target platforms. To estimate how well the application fits the architecture, we define a metric of computational intensity both for the architecture and the application implementation. Besides being useful to compare either different implementation or algorithmic choices and their fitness to a specific architecture, it can also be useful to the compiler to guide the code optimization process. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Portable virtual cycle accounting for large-scale distributed cycle sharing systems

CPU cycle sharing among distributed heterogeneous computers is the key function in large-scale volunteer computing and desktop grid applications. One important problem in large-scale distributed cycle sharing system is how to account for the amount of computation work performed by a CPU cycle provider, in a uniform and portable fashion across heterogeneous hardware and operating system platforms. Such an accounting mechanism is especially desirable when CPU resources are traded and a lack of uniform workload accounting will hinder the enforcement of market-driven CPU pricing/trading policies in distributed cycle sharing systems. Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has proved to be a good match for distributed cycle sharing because of its abilities to run applications on a wide variety of platforms without modification (portability) and to host untrusted applications (safety). In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an efficient, application-transparent virtual cycle accounting scheme integrated into JVM. Our scheme achieves portable workload accounting across heterogeneous computing platforms by accounting for JVM virtual instructions instead of real processor cycles. Different from the existing JVM CPU accounting mechanisms that involve bytecode rewriting, our scheme is transparent to applications and does not require visible changes to application and library code interfaces which would break applications that use Reflection API. Moreover, our scheme is efficient via the use of processor registers for accounting. Our experimental results demonstrate both high accounting accuracy and low runtime overhead of virtual cycle accounting.     

NBA: novel bio-inspired algorithm for energy optimization in WSN for IoT applications

The Journal of Supercomputing - Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are the integral part of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. They consist of many sensor nodes energized by batteries. These...