Abstract

Recent work in wireless embedded networked systems has followed heterogeneous designs, incorporating a mixture of elements from extremely constrained 8- or 16-bit “Motes ” to less resourceconstrained 32-bit embedded “Microservers.” Emstar is a software environment for developing and deploying complex applications on such heterogeneous networks. Emstar is designed to leverage the additional resources of Microservers by trading off some performance for system robustness in sensor network applications. It enables fault isolation, fault tolerance, system visiblity, in-field debugging, and resource sharing across multiple applications. In order to accomplish these objectives, Emstar is designed to run as a multiprocess system and consists of libraries that implement message-passing IPC primitives, services that support networking, sensing, and time synchronization, and tools that support simulation, emulation, and visualization of live systems, both real and simulated. We evaluate this work by discussing the Acoustic ENSBox, a platform for distributed acoustic sensing that we built using Emstar. We show that by leveraging existing Emstar services, we are able to significantly reduce development time This work was made possible with support from The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) under the NSF Cooperative Agreement CCR-0120778, and the UC MICRO program (grant

Citations