Scalaness/nesT: type specialized staged programming for sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Peter Chapin;Christian Skalka;Scott Smith;Michael Watson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Vermont;University of Vermont;The Johns Hopkins University;University of Vermont

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Generative programming: concepts & experiences
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Programming wireless embedded networks is challenging due to severe limitations on processing speed, memory, and bandwidth. Staged programming can help bridge the gap between high level code refinement techniques and efficient device level programs by allowing a first stage program to specialize device level code. Here we introduce a two stage programming system for wireless sensor networks. The first stage program is written in our extended dialect of Scala, called Scalaness, where components written in our type safe dialect of nesC, called nesT, are composed and specialized. Scalaness programs can dynamically construct TinyOS-compliant nesT device images that can be deployed to motes. A key result, called cross-stage type safety, shows that successful static type checking of a Scalaness program means no type errors will arise either during programmatic composition and specialization of WSN code, or later on the WSN itself. Scalaness has been implemented through direct modification of the Scala compiler. Implementation of a staged public-key cryptography calculation shows the sensor memory footprint can be significantly reduced by staging.