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Resource aware programming in the Pixie OS

Published: 05 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents Pixie, a new sensor node operating system designed to support the needs of data-intensive applications. These applications, which include high-resolution monitoring of acoustic, seismic, acceleration, and other signals, involve high data rates and extensive in-network processing. Given the fundamentally resource-limited nature of sensor networks, a pressing concern for such applications is their ability to receive feedback on, and adapt their behavior to, fluctuations in both resource availability and load.
The Pixie OS is based on a dataflow programming model based on the concept of resource tickets, a core abstraction for representing resource availability and reservations. By giving the system visibility and fine-grained control over resource management, a broad range of policies can be implemented. To shield application programmers from the burden of managing these details, Pixie provides a suite of resource brokers, which mediate between low-level physical resources and higher-level application demands. Pixie is implemented in NesC and supports limited backwards compatibility with TinyOS.
We describe Pixie in the context of two applications: limb motion analysis for patients undergoing treatment for motion disorders, and acoustic target detection using a network of microphones. We present a range of experiments demonstrating Pixie's ability to accurately account for resource availability at runtime and enable a range of both generic and application-specific adaptations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SenSys '08: Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
November 2008
468 pages
ISBN:9781595939906
DOI:10.1145/1460412
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. resource reservations
  2. resource-aware programming
  3. wireless sensor networks

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Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 867 submissions, 20%

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