Optimizing sensor network reprogramming via in situ reconfigurable components

Abstract

Wireless reprogramming of sensor nodes is a critical requirement in long-lived wireless sensor networks (WSNs) addressing several concerns, such as fixing bugs, upgrading the operating system and applications, and adapting applications behavior according to the physical environment. In such resource-poor platforms, the ability to efficiently delimit and reconfigure the necessary portion of sensor software—instead of updating the full binary image—is of vital importance. However, most existing approaches in this field have not been adopted widely to date due to the extensive use of WSN resources or lack of generality. In this article, we therefore consider WSN programming models and runtime reconfiguration models as two interrelated factors and we present an integrated approach for addressing efficient reprogramming in WSNs. The middleware solution we propose, <scp<RemoWare</scp<, is characterized by mitigating the cost of post-deployment software updates on sensor nodes via the notion of in situ reconfigurability and providing a component-based programming abstraction in order to facilitate the development of dynamic WSN applications. Our evaluation results show that <scp<RemoWare</scp< imposes a very low energy overhead in code distribution and component reconfiguration and consumes approximately 6% of the total code memory on a <scp<TelosB</scp< sensor platform.