The DESAL (Dynamic Embedded Sensing and Actuation Language) Project

Recent research in wireless sensor networks has seen major development in the hardware technologies, resulting in smaller and cheaper sensor nodes (termed as motes). However, these developments have made the motes significantly resource limited (in terms of memory, battery life, processing power, and bandwidth). With the increasing demand of sensor networks, applications have become more complex. Consequently it is becoming more and more challenging to program these resource-poor motes to support the advanced applications.  Also, the more complex a program is, the more difficult it is for the programmers to guarantee its logical correctness.  The current languages cannot guarantee error-free program development, which may lead to an unpredictable behavior of the network.

This research work focuses on the construction of a programming, named DESAL, that will enable a programmar to develop error-free applications. DESAL will provide the programmars with a high level, state based language to code their sensor network applications. Unlike NesC, the programmars need not worry about the underlying wiring needed for the TinyOS modules. Thus, the language will be very user friendly and easy to learn.

The DESAL compiler will also have the ability to check the logical correctness of a program during its construction. Since the test cases proving the logical correctness are never exhaustive, it is very resource demanding to run those tests, and hence, the formal method is far better. Once the programs are logically correct, the network will be guaranteed to function in a predictable way.  The research also proposes to accomplish certain types of fault detection. If a logically correct program exhibits faulty behavior, implementation error, hardware failures or security attacks hampering normal program execution is suspected. This suspicion, or fault detection, initiates methods to identify and correct the faults, resulting in a more robust network.

DESAL is a joint project with Ohio State University, Clemson University, Cleveland State University and University of Texas at Austin. The project is funded by NSF.

Clemson link.

Ohio State link.

Iowa's Parsing Package

Click here

Converting DESAL program to an equivalent Java program

Click here

My Proposal Report

Click Here

My Comprehensive Report

Click here

DESAL developed at University of Iowa

Click here

Currently I am working on to add a tool to the DESAL middleware to achieve energy-efficient scheduling. We have written a paper with a self-stabilizing protocol to achieve this (submitted to SSS 2009). Click here to read it.

Background and Related Work

  1. Philip Levis, David E. Culler: Maté: a tiny virtual machine for sensor networks. ASPLOS 2002: 85-95
  1. Chih-Chieh Han, Ram Kumar, Roy Shea, Eddie Kohler, Mani B. Srivastava: A dynamic operating system for sensor nodes. MobiSys 2005: 163-176
  1. Anand Eswaran, Anthony Rowe, Raj Rajkumar: Nano-RK: An Energy-Aware Resource-Centric RTOS for Sensor Networks. RTSS 2005: 256-265
  1. L. Gu and J. A. Stankovic, t-kernel: Providing Reliable OS Support for Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proc. of the 4th ACM Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'06), Nov, 2006.
  1. [TeWS06] Terfloth, K.; Wittenburg, G.; Schiller, J.: FACTS - A Rule-Based Middleware Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks, First IEEE International Conference on Communication System Software and Middleware (COMSWARE 2006), New Delhi, India, January 2006
  1. Chien-Liang Fok, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Chenyang Lu: Rapid Development and Flexible Deployment of Adaptive Wireless Sensor Network Applications. ICDCS 2005: 653-662
  1. Kwon, YoungMin, Sameer Sundresh, Kirill Mechitov, Gul Agha. "ActorNet: An Actor Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks," Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2006.
  1. Omprakash Gnawali, Ben Greenstein, Ki-Young Jang, August Joki, Jeongyeup Paek, Marcos Vieira, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, Eddie Kohler, The TENET Architecture for Tiered Sensor Networks, In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Sensys), November 2006.
  1. Ramakrishna Gummadi, Omprakash Gnawali, Ramesh Govindan: Macro-programming Wireless Sensor Networks Using Kairos. DCOSS 2005: 126-140
  1. Jaein Jeong; Culler, D., Incremental Network Programming for Wireless Sensors, IEEE SECON 2004, October 2004
  1. Matt Welsh, Geoff Mainland: Programming Sensor Networks Using Abstract Regions. NSDI 2004: 29-42
  1.  Newton, R., Arvind, and Welsh, M. 2005. Building up to macroprogramming: an intermediate language for sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th international Symposium on information Processing in Sensor Networks (Los Angeles, California, April 24 - 27, 2005). Information Processing In Sensor Networks. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 6.
  1. Razavi, Reza, Kirill Mechitov, Gul Agha, Jean-Francois Perrot. "Dynamic Macroprogramming of Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Agents," 2nd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence (AITAmI), 2007.
  1. [TeWS06] Terfloth, K.; Wittenburg, G.; Schiller, J.: Rule-oriented Programming for Wireless Sensor Networks,International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Networks (DCOSS) EAWMS Workshop, San Francisco, USA, June 2006
  1.  Razavi, Reza, Kirill Mechitov, Sameer Sundresh, Gul Agha, Jean-Francois Perrot. "Ambiance: Adaptive Object Model-based Platform for Macroprogramming Sensor Networks," ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), 2006.
  1.  Abstractions for Safe Concurrent Programming in Networked Embedded Ssytems.  William P. McCartney and Nigamanth Sridhar.  Proceedings of SenSys '06: 4th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, November 1--3 2006. Pages 167--180.
  1.  Shondip Sen, Rachel Cardell-Oliver. A Rule-Based Language for Programming Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks using Frequency and Communication. In proceedings of the third IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, Cambridge, MA. May 2006
  1.  Jie Liu, Maurice Chu, Juan Liu, James Reich, and Feng Zhao, “State-Centric Programming for Sensor-Actuator Network Systems.” in IEEE Pervasive Computing, October, 2003, pp.50-62.
  1. Eric Klavins, Richard M. Murray, "Distributed Algorithms for Cooperative Control," IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 03,  no. 1,  pp. 56-65,  Jan-Mar,  2004.
  1.  Zoumboulakis, M., Roussos, G., and Poulovassilis, A. 2004. Active rules for sensor databases. In Proceeedings of the 1st international Workshop on Data Management For Sensor Networks: in Conjunction with VLDB 2004 (Toronto, Canada, August 30 - 30, 2004). DMSN '04, vol. 72. ACM Press, New York, NY, 98-103. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1052199.1052215
  1.  "Declarative Resource Naming for Macroprogramming Wireless Networks of Embedded Systems", C. Intagonwiwat, R. Gupta and A. Vahdat, To appear in International Workshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks (ALGOSENSORS), Venice, Italy, July 15 2006.
  1. Tarek F. Abdelzaher, Brian M. Blum, Qing Cao, Y. Chen, D. Evans, J. George, S. George, Lin Gu, Tian He, Sudha Krishnamurthy, Liqian Luo, Sang Hyuk Son, Jack Stankovic, Radu Stoleru, Anthony D. Wood: EnviroTrack: Towards an Environmental Computing Paradigm for Distributed Sensor Networks. ICDCS 2004: 582-589
  1. Madden, S. R., Franklin, M. J., Hellerstein, J. M., and Hong, W. 2005. TinyDB: an acquisitional query processing system for sensor networks. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 30, 1(Mar.2005), 122-173. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1061318.1061322
  1. Kwon, YoungMin, Gul Agha. "Scalable Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks," to appear in Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), IEEE, 2006.
  1. Sensor Network Software Update Management: A Survey in International Journal of Network Management, vol:15 , no:1099-1190 , pp:283-294 , 26 pages , John Wiley & Sons, Inc. , New York, NY, USA , July 2005. NESL Technical Report #: TR-UCLA-NESL-200503-09
  1.  Phil Buonadonna, Joseph Hellerstein, Wei Hong, David Gay, Samuel Madden. TASK: Sensor Network in a Box. In Proceedings of European Workshop on Sensor Networks, 2005.
  1. Greenstein, B., Kohler, E., and Estrin, D. 2004. A sensor network application construction kit (SNACK). In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Baltimore, MD, USA, November 03 - 05, 2004). SenSys '04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 69-80. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1031495.1031505