Formal methods: state of the art and future directions
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) - Special ACM 50th-anniversary issue: strategic directions in computing research
The Theory and Practice of Concurrency
The Theory and Practice of Concurrency
The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
Software composition and verification for sensor networks
Science of Computer Programming - Special issue on new software composition concepts
Interface contracts for TinyOS
Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
Increasing the reliability of wireless sensor networks with a distributed testing framework
Proceedings of the 4th workshop on Embedded networked sensors
Deriving State Machines from TinyOS Programs Using Symbolic Execution
IPSN '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
Using CSP to Model and Analyze TinyOS Applications
ECBS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 16th Annual IEEE International Conference and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems
Low-Level Code Verification Based on CSP Models
Formal Methods: Foundations and Applications
Compositional reasoning for hardware/software co-verification
ATVA'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis
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Wireless sensor networks are an increasingly popular application area for embedded systems. Individual sensor nodes within a network are typically resource-constrained, event-driven, and require a high degree of concurrency. This combination of requirements motivated the development of the widely used TinyOS sensor node operating system. The TinyOS concurrency model is a lightweight nonpreemptive system designed to suit the needs of typical sensor network applications. Although the TinyOS concurrency model is easier to reason about than preemptive threads, it can still give rise to undesirable behavior due to unexpected interleavings of related tasks, or unanticipated preemption by interrupt handlers. To aid TinyOS developers in understanding the behavior of their programs we have developed a technique for using the process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) to model the interactions between TinyOS components, and between an application and the TinyOS scheduling and preemption mechanisms. Analysis of the resulting models can help TinyOS developers to discover and diagnose concurrency-related errors in their designs that might otherwise go undetected until after the application has been widely deployed. Such analysis is particularly valuable for the TinyOS components that are used as building blocks for a large number of other applications, since a subtle or sporadic error in a widely deployed building block component could be extremely costly to repair.