TinyOS and nesC Programming Approaches and Challenges for Networked Embedded Systems - Research Paper Example

Approaches and Challenges for Networked Embedded Systems in TinyOS and nesC Programming TinyOS is a type of computer software whose source code is freely available for change or distribution. It is one of the main operating systems that is component-based and therefore suited for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Tiny OS is also an embedded operating system always written in the nesC languages that occur as a set of cooperate tasks and processes. Due to the emergency of compact, as well as the low-power communication mainly wireless and the Networked sensors that gives rise to the totally new kinds of embedded systems that are distributed and deployed in an active, and that which is constantly changing and adaptive control environments.

These types of Networked Sensors are compact devices that could be used to movement, sense, heat, position, light, and many others. That is from real environments and communicated back information to the old-fashioned computers (Dalton et al.). There was need for assistance for each other while collecting data and handing in the results to the main collection point. Challenges In order for nesC to be addressed thoroughly, there should be guidance by the interaction with the environment: Not similar to the out-dated type of computers, motes are mainly used to collect data and in managing the local environment and not the general cause of computation.

Therefore, there is focus that leads to two observations. Most motes are very important in the event that is driven by the reactions to changes in the environment that involves message arrival and sensor acquisition. These occur as a result to being driven by interactive or rather the batch processing. This shows that the second event arrival and data processing are concurrent and all the activities demand the main approach to the concurrency management that tend to address the potential bugs such as race conditions.

Limited resources: energy consumption dominatesThese happen because motes have very limited physical resources that occur because of the goals of small sizes, low power consumption and low cost. There is no new technology that removes these limitations that benefit the Moore’s Law that will be applied to reduce the size and cost rather than increasing the capability that the current motes are measured in square centimeters (Levis and Gay).Concurrency: driven by interaction with environmentThis has a deferred computation runs to completion and with no pre-emption.

It is invoked by module upcall and may pre-empt the basic tasks or many other events. Additionally, very low overhead or no threads. This also helps in data collection and control processes. Not only that but it serves the general purpose computation (Antsaklis). With that it is reactive and event-driven type of programming model. On the other hand, Soft real-time requirements, defines few time-critical tasks sensor acquisition and radio timing. Therefore, timing restraints through the complete control over app and OS.

Reliability: lower run-time errorsDespite the fact that individual motes are expected to fail because of hardware matters, this should enable us to have a long-lived application, and the main goal is to decrease runtime errors because there is no real recovery of the mechanism in the field that is expected for automatic reboot. For instance the environmental monitoring applications should collect data without any human interaction over a long period of time.High diversity of platformsThere are various applications to server platforms.

Some tend to support memory allocation as well as in extending race detection mechanisms that handle the dynamic communication and aliasing. Threaded-style concurrency occurs with limitations too. Finally we find that there is lack of well-defined software and hardware boundary. The problem that data is shared across components defends the false positives for buffer swapping. In addition, the problems for data being shared between split-phase operations that should explain the event that can potentially fire if there is access to other components HW.

nesC is established on major concepts and components, it also directly support TinyOS’s event-based concurrency model. Additionally, nesC openly addressed the issue of concurrent access to the collective data. In the main practice, nesC many uncertainties were resolved in the TinyOS concepts of components and concurrency, and TinyOS evolved to the nesC versions as it was re-implemented.Work citedAntsaklis, P. Conference Report - Workshop On Networked Embedded Sensing And Control (NESC05). IEEE Control Syst. 26.1 (2006): 111-112. Web.Dalton, Andrew R. et al. Visualizing The Runtime Behavior Of Embedded Network Systems: A Toolkit For Tinyos.

Science of Computer Programming 74.7 (2009): 446-469. Web.Gay, David, Philip Levis, and David Culler. Software Design Patterns For Tinyos. TECS 6.4 (2007): 22-es. Web.Lee, Sunggu, and Priya Narasimhan. Software Technologies For Embedded And Ubiquitous Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Print.Levis, Philip, and David E Gay. Tinyos Programming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.