A low-overhead script language for tiny networked embedded systems

With sensor networks starting to get mainstream acceptance, programmability is of increasing im-portance. Customers and field engineers will need to reprogram existing deployments and software de-velopers will need to test and debug software in network testbeds. Script languages, which are a popular mechanism for reprogramming in general-purpose computing, have not been considered for wireless sen-sor networks because of the perceived overhead of interpreting a script language on tiny sensor nodes. In this paper we show that a structured script language is both feasible and efficient for programming tiny sensor nodes. We present a structured script language, SCript, and develop an interpreter for the language. To reduce program distribution energy the SCript interpreter stores a tokenized representation of the scripts which is distributed through the wireless network. The ROM and RAM footprint of the interpreter is similar to that of existing virtual machines for sensor networks. We show that the interpre-tation overhead of our language is on par with that of existing virtual machines. Thus script languages, previously considered as too expensive for tiny sensor nodes, are a viable alternative to virtual machines.