Exploiting safe parallelism in Wireless Sensor Networks: A generic and reconfigurable approach

Abstract

The deployment of complex, multi-threaded sensor network applications is growing rapidly (e.g there are dual-core sensor mote platforms such as the Microsoft m-platform). This paper argues that parallelism can benefit networked sensors, particularly if it is based on a safe approach, i.e., follows a deadlock-free paradigm. Sensor network applications should be deadlock-free because applications running on sensor networks are often critical and thus, it is undesirable to encounter concurrency problems in such environments. This paper presents an approach to ensuring safe parallelism in sensor networks and shows a number of potential benefits to this domain. This is particularly highlighted by a case study on runtime reconfigurable wireless network communication that promotes deadlock-free reconfigurable parallelism.