Incremental Network Programming for Wireless Sensors

Jaein JEONG, David CULLER

Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2009.25048                

Abstract

We present an incremental network programming mechanism which reprograms wireless sensors quickly by transmitting the incremental changes using the Rsync algorithm; we generate the difference of the two program images allowing us to distribute only the key changes. Unlike previous approaches, our design does not assume any prior knowledge of the program code structure and can be applied to any hardware platform. To meet the resource constraints of wireless sensors, we tuned the Rsync algorithm which was originally made for updating binary files among powerful host machines. The sensor node processes the delivery and the decoding of the difference script separately making it easy to extend for multi-hop network programming. We are able to get a speed-up of 9.1 for changing a constant and 2.1 to 2.5 for changing a few lines in the source code.

Keywords

Network Programming, Incremental, Wireless Sensor Networks, Difference Generation, Rsync Algorithm

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	J. Jeong, S. Kim, and A. Broad, “Network reprogramming,” http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/tos/tinyos-1.x/doc/Net -workReprogramming.pdf., 2003.
[2]	Crossbow Technology. Mote in network programming user reference, http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/tos/tinyos-1.x/ doc/Xnp.pdf., 2003.
[3]	A. Tridgell, “Efficient algorithms for sorting and synchronization. PhD thesis,” Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, February 1999.
[4]	A. Atmega, 128 microcontroller reference, http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc2467.pdf.
[5]	T. Stathopoulos, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin, “A remote code update mechanism for wireless sensor networks, cens technical report #30,” http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/ thanos/ moap-TR.pdf., 2003.
[6]	J. W. Hui and D. Culler, “The dynamic behavior of a data dissemination protocol for network programming at scale,” pp. 81–94, November 2004.
[7]	P. Levis, N. Lee, M. Welsh, and D. Culler, “Tossim: Accurate and scalable simulation of entire tinyos applications,” The First ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys’03), 2003.
[8]	N. Reijers and K. Langendoen, “Efficient code distribution in wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA’03), pp. 60–67, September 2003.
[9]	R. Kapur, T. Yeh, and U. Lahoti, “Differential wireless reprogramming of sensor networks, ucla cs213 project report,” 2003.
[10]	T. Yeh, H. Yamamoto, and T. Stathopolous, “Over-theair reprogramming of wireless sensor nodes, ucla ee202a project report, http://www.cs.ucla.edu/?tomyeh/ee202a/ project/EE202a_final_writeup.doc., 2003.
[11]	P. Levis and D. C. Maté, “A tiny virtual machine for sensor networks,” Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS’02), pp. 85–95, October 2002.
[12]	P. Levis, N. Patel, S. Shenker, and D. Culler, “Trickle: A self-regulating algorithm for code propagation and maintenance in wireless sensor networks,” in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Symposium on Networked Sys-tems Design and Implementation (NSDI’04), pp. 2, March 2004.
[13]	W. Emmerich, C. Mascolo, and A. Finkelstein, in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, June 2000.
[14]	A. Muthitacharoen, B. Chen, and D. Mazi′eres, “A low -bandwidth network file system,” pp. 174–187, October 2001.
[15]	G. H. Flammer, “Method for distributing program code to intelligent nodes in a wireless mesh data communication network,” US Patent 5,903,566, May 1999.
[16]	C. M. Jarsync, “A java implementation of the rsync algo-rithm,” http://jarsync.sourceforge.net/.