TinyGALS: A Programming Model for Event-Driven Embedded Systems

Networked embedded systems such as wireless sensor networks are usually designed to be event-driven so that they are reactive and power efficient. Programming embedded systems with multiple reactive tasks is difficult due to the complex nature of managing the concurrency of execution threads and consistency of shared states. This paper describes a globally asynchronous and locally synchronous model (TinyGALS) for programming event-driven embedded systems. Software components are composed locally through synchronous method calls to form modules, and asynchronous message passing is used between modules to separate the flow of control. In addition, a guarded yet synchronous model (TinyGUYS) is designed to allow thread-safe sharing of global state by multiple modules without explicitly passing messages. This programming model is structured such that all asynchronous message passing code and module triggering mechanisms can be automatically generated from a high-level specification. We hav...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Elaine Cheong, Judith Liebman, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Asynchronous Message Passing, Embedded Systems, SAC 2003, Wireless Sensor Network