Composing µSIC: A Lightweight Service Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Although wireless sensor network applications share a common set of limitations (e.g. resource scarcity and lossy radio communication models) a basic set of runtime services (e.g. routing, time synchronization, and code dissemination), applications are often designed in an ad-hoc fashion, reducing the amount of code reuse, making a component-based software engineering approach desirable. We present a micro service component model, entitled muSIC, that abstracts a sensor node as an entity that provides and uses services. This model is realized through the use of the muSIC runtime, a small and efficient message-oriented middleware (MOM) tailored for resource-constrained devices. The muSIC runtime can perform service-paging, a method of storing a service's state to flash memory and restoring it whenever the service is needed. Secondly, we provide a domain-specific language allowing applications to be expressed as a collection of services that run on top of the muSIC runtime and enables a multi-threaded programming model.