Language Support for Interoperable Messaging in Sensor Networks

Development of network communication in a homogeneous sensor network environment is straightforward as the nodes can share message layouts simply by letting the compiler lay out messages in an arbitrary fashion and using the same executable code on all nodes. However, this simple approach does not usually work in a heterogeneous sensor network setting because different compilers may generate different message layouts, and different processors often have different basic type representations and alignments. The traditional solutions to this problem is to either require programmers to insert network-byte-order and host-byte-order conversions, or to use a compiler that automatically generates marshalling and unmarshalling routines. Unfortunately, these approaches are inadequate for sensor networks because they are either error-prone and/or add significant overheads to already resource-constrained sensor motes. Instead, we propose a language extension — network types — which supports ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SCOPES
• Authors: Kevin Chang, David Gay
• Keywords: Network Types, SCOPES 2005, Sensor Networks, Supports Heterogeneous Networking