Sensor Networks: there is an OS behind the hype
with Philippe Bonnet
Sensor networks have been a hot topic in the research community for some years now. Sensor networks are collections of sensors with embedded computation and short range communication capabilities that can be densely deployed thus providing new capabilities for the instrumentation of the phyiscal world.
The vision of truly pervasive computing at the boundary of the digital and the physical world, sometimes referred to as smart dust has captured the imaginations. At its height, the hype promised decentralized, cooperative computation based on self-organized networks of autnomous, energy efficient motes. Obviously the field of sensor network is not living up to that hype. However, very significant breakthroughs have been achieved in the last few years, and there remains exciting challenges to be tackled.
In this talk, I will make a brief status of the state of the art and give an overview of the main breakthroughs that have been achieved in the past few years. I will then focus on the efforts that have been made to facilitate the programming of sensor networks. In the process, I will introduce TinyOS, an open source OS for network embedded systems, developed at UC Berkeley and now supported by a global alliance. I will conclude by a description of ongoing efforts at University of Copenhagen (TinyOS for 8051, 802.15.4 stack in TinyOS, application of sensor networks to Escience).
Philippe Bonnet has worked in the area of sensor networks since
1999 where he was in charge of Cornell's contribution to the 1st DARPA
program in the area (SensIT). He was PC Co-chair of the 4th International
Conference on Networked Embedded Systems (Sensys 2006) and is editor
of the journal ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks. He is in charge of
DIKU's contribution to the Hogthrob project funded by the Danish
Research Agency (2004-2007) and two EU projects on sensor networks:
Wisent (2004-2006) and CRUISE (2005-2007). Philippe is heading the
TinyOS working group on 8051 and he is member of the TinyOS Alliance
working group.