Abstractions for safe concurrent programming in networked embedded systems

Over the last several years, large-scale wireless mote net-works have made possible the exploration of a new class of highly-concurrent and highly-distributed applications. As the horizon of what kinds of applications can be built on these networked embedded systems keeps expanding, there is a need to keep the activity of programming such systems easy, efficient, and scalable. We make three major contri-butions in this paper. First, we present a library for TinyOS and nesC that enables true multi-threading on a mote. This library includes support for all mote platforms in use cur-rently (AVR, MSP). Second, we present a tool that can effec-tively and accurately compute stack requirements for multi-threaded programs. Such analysis ensures that the stacks al-located to individual threads are correctly sized. Finally, we present a collection of programming abstractions that simpli-fies the construction of concurrent systems for the mote plat-form. We also present experimental results obtained from several example systems built using our concurrent program-ming abstractions and the underlying thread library. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3 [Special purpose and Application-based systems]