From C to VM-targeted executables: Techniques for heterogeneous sensor/actuator networks

Abstract

The paper presents reusable techniques for building a runtime environment for a middleware targeted at heterogeneous sensor/actuator networks (SAN). The SAN is heterogeneous in that nodes differ as to the underlying MCU and OS platform, as well as sensor and actuator resources. Applications destined for the middleware are written in C and then transformed into executables interpreted by a virtual machine. The runtime residing on each node exposes, besides the virtual CPU, a node-independent set of general-purpose primitives and a node-specific set of primitives representing the node's sensors and actuators. The latter primitives are drawn from a potentially huge set of primitives representing all sensors and actuators possible in a given application domain. A proof-of-concept implementation of the runtime environment, for a severely resource-constrained platform, is presented.