Sentomist: Unveiling Transient Sensor Network Bugs via Symptom Mining

—Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications are typically event-driven. While the source codes of these applications may look simple, they are executed with a complicated concurrency model, which frequently introduces software bugs, in particular, transient bugs. Such buggy logics may only be triggered by some occasionally interleaved events that bear implicit dependency, but can lead to fatal system failures. Unfortunately, these deeply-hidden bugs or even their symptoms can hardly be identified by state-of-the-art debugging tools, and manual identification from massive running traces can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present Sentomist (Sensor application anatomist), a novel tool for identifying potential transient bugs in WSN applications. The Sentomist design is based on a key observation that transient bugs make the behaviors of a WSN system deviate from the normal, and thus outliers (i.e., abnormal behaviors) are good indicators of potential bugs. Sentomist int...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Yangfan Zhou, Xinyu Chen, Michael R. Lyu, Jiangchuan Liu
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2010, Potential Transient Bugs, Transient Bugs, WSN Applications