Macrodebugging: global views of distributed program execution

Creating and debugging programs for wireless embedded networks (WENs) is notoriously difficult. Macroprogramming is an emerging technology that aims to address this by providing high-level programming abstractions. We present MDB, the first system to support the debugging of macroprograms. MDB allows the user to set breakpoints and step through a macroprogram using a sourcelevel debugging interface similar to GDB, a process we call macrodebugging. A key challenge of MDB is to step through a macroprogram in sequential order even though it executes on the network in a distributed, asynchronous manner. Besides allowing the user to view distributed state, MDB also provides the ability to search for bugs over the entire history of distributed states. Finally, MDB allows the user to make hypothetical changes to a macroprogram and to see the effect on distributed state without the need to redeploy, execute, and test the new code. We show that macrodebugging is both easy and efficient: MDB...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SENSYS
• Authors: Tamim I. Sookoor, Timothy W. Hnat, Pieter Hooimeijer, Westley Weimer, Kamin Whitehouse
• Keywords: Debugging, Sensor Networks, SENSYS 2009, Sourcelevel Debugging Interface, Wireless Embedded Networks