Active Message Communication for Tiny Networked Sensors.pdfVIP

1 Active Message Communication for Tiny Networked Sensors Philip Buonadonna, Jason Hill, David Culler Abstract— is dependent on a fast processing component. Routing We present an implementation and evaluation of an Ac- protocols implemented above these e.g., OSPF are com- tive Messages based communication system for tiny, wire- plex and place bandwidth demands that become unten- less, networked sensors. The implementation includes two able for links with kilobits per second throughput. Fi- major software components. The ?rst is the device based nally, common high level software abstractions for using operating program which includes the communication sub- the network, such as sockets, are not well suited to the system, dispatch loop and AM handlers. The second is a communication library for general purpose host computers. constrained environment of tiny network devices. Inter- Using an Atmel 8535 based device and an Intel Pentium II faces centered on “stop and wait” semantics do not meet PC, we demonstrate an ad hoc networking application that the power and agility requirements of these small devices. uses Active Message primitives for multi-hop route discov- In this paper, we investigate the application of the Active ery and packet delivery on silver dollar sized devices. We Messages paradigm to mini-device communication. We also make observations about the applicability of TCP/IP to believe that there is a fundamental ?t between the event the Tiny Networked Sensor regime. based nature of network sensor applications and the event based primitives of the Active Messages communication I. INTRODUCTION model. It is a framework that handles the limitations of The Post-PC era of computing has introduced an array these devices, yet provides a powerful programming envi- of small devices that perform a variety of speci?c func- ronment capable of supporting a wide space of concurrent tions. Cellular