Abstract
Supporting the concurrent execution of multiple tasks on lightweight sensor nodes could enable the deployment of independent applications on a shared wireless sensor network, thus saving cost and time by exploiting infrastructures which are typically underutilized if dedicated to a single task. Existing approaches to wireless sensor network programming provide limited support to concurrency at the cost of reducing the generality and the expressiveness of the language adopted. This paper presents a java-compatible platform for wireless sensor networks which provides a thorough support to preemptive multitasking while allowing the programmers to write their applications in java. The proposed approach has been implemented and tested on top of VirtualSense, an ultra-low-power wireless sensor mote providing a java-compatible runtime environment. Performance and scalability of the solution are discussed in light of extensive experiments performed on representative benchmarks.
Highlights
Multitasking is a method which allows multiple tasks to be concurrently performed in the same time period by a shared processing unit
The experiments were designed to demonstrate the capability of VirtualSense to support concurrent execution of multiple tasks on top of ultra-low-power sensor nodes
The experiments reported in the following subsections provide evidence that Virtualsense motes make it possible to simultaneously share computational and sensing resources among multiple tasks as it usually happens in multitasking computer systems
Summary
Multitasking is a method which allows multiple tasks to be concurrently performed in the same time period by a shared processing unit. A multitasking WSN could be deployed once and for all in a given place and made available to end users and software developers as a common platform to run any kind of context-aware applications, possibly focused on different physical quantities, targeting different portions of the network, and belonging to different users. This can be useful to deploy shared test beds allowing different research groups to run comparative experiments, and to enable a thorough sharing of real world sensor networks among different users independently running their own tasks. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a survey of existing approaches to multitasking in WSNs; Section 3 provides a minimum background on VirtualSense and on the components of its software stack; Section 4 presents the programming model; Section 5 outlines the proposed architecture; Section 6 reports and discusses experimental results; Section 7 concludes the work
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