Abstract

Nupur Kothari, Kiran Nagaraja, Vijay Raghunathan, Florin Sultan, Srimat Chakradhar, HERMES: A Software Architecture for Visibility and Control in Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks: Special track on Sensor Platform Tools and Design Methods (IPSN/SPOTS'08), April 2008. [PDF] [Abstract]

Designing reliable software for sensor networks is challenging because application developers have little visibility into, and understanding of, the post-deployment behavior of code executing on resource constrained nodes in remote and ill-reproducible environments. To address this problem, this paper presents HERMES, a lightweight framework and prototype tool that provides fine-grained visibility and control of a sensor node's software at run-time. HERMES's architecture is based on the notion of interposition, which enables it to provide these properties in a minimally intrusive manner, without requiring any modification to software applications being observed and controlled. HERMES provides a general, extensible, and easy-to-use framework for specifying which software components to observe and control as well as when and how this observation and control is done. We have implemented and tested a fully functional prototype of HERMES for the SOS sensor operating system. Our performance evaluation, using real sensor nodes as well as cycle-accurate simulation, shows that HERMES successfully achieves its objective of providing fine-grained and dynamic visibility and control without incurring significant resource overheads. We demonstrate the utility and flexibility of HERMES by using our prototype to design, implement, and evaluate three case-studies: debugging and testing deployed sensor network applications, performing transparent software updates in sensor nodes, and implementing network traffic shaping and resource policing.

@inproceedings{Kothari08b,
	author = {Nupur Kothari and Kiran Nagaraja and Vijay Raghunathan and Florin Sultan and Srimat Chakradhar},
	title = {{HERMES: A Software Architecture for Visibility and Control in Wireless Sensor Networks}},
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks: Special track on Sensor Platform Tools and Design Methods (IPSN/SPOTS'08)",
	year = "2008",
	month = "April",
	address = "St. Louis, Missouri",
}