EmStar: A Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks

Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Alberto Cerpa, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, Deborah Estrin

Abstract

Many Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications are composed of a mixture of deployed devices with varying capabilities, from extremely constrained 8-bit Motes to less resource-constrained 32-bit Microservers. EmStar is a software environment for developing and deploying complex WSN applications on networks of 32-bit embedded Microserver platforms, and integrating with networks of Motes. EmStar consists of libraries that implement message-passing IPC primitives, tools that support simulation, emulation, and visualization of live systems, both real and simulated, and services that support networking, sensing, and time synchronization. While EmStar's design has favored ease of use and modularity over efficiency, the resulting increase in overhead has not been an impediment to any of our current projects.

Availability

PDF

Reference

Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Alberto Cerpa, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, Deborah Estrin, "EmStar: A Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks," Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC 2004), pp. 283--296, USENIX, Boston, MA, USA, June, 2004.

Bibtex

@Conference{Girod04a,
  author =       "Lewis Girod and Jeremy Elson and Alberto Cerpa and
                 Thanos Stathopoulos and Nithya Ramanathan and Deborah
                 Estrin",
  title =        "EmStar: {A} Software Environment for Developing and
                 Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical
                 Conference (ATC 2004)",
  pages =        "283--296",
  address =      "Boston, MA, USA",
  year =         "2004",
  month =        jun,
  publisher =    "USENIX",
  URL =          "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Girod04a.pdf",
  accept =       "13",
  cited =        "330",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2004 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial purposes. New copies must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.