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Declarative tracepoints: a programmable and application independent debugging system for wireless sensor networks

Published: 05 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Effective debugging usually involves watching program state to diagnose bugs. When debugging sensor network applications, this approach is often time-consuming and errorprone, not only because of the lack of visibility into system state, but also because of the difficulty to watch the right variables at the right time. In this paper, we present declarative tracepoints, a debugging system that allows the user to insert a group of action-associated checkpoints, or tracepoints, to applications being debugged at runtime. Tracepoints do not require modifying application source code. Instead, they are written in a declarative, SQL-like language called TraceSQL independently. By triggering the associated actions when these checkpoints are reached, this system automates the debugging process by removing the human from the loop. We show that declarative tracepoints are able to express the core functionality of a range of previously isolated debugging techniques, such as EnviroLog, NodeMD, Sympathy, and StackGuard. We describe the design and implementation of the declarative tracepoints system, evaluate its overhead in terms of CPU slowdown, illustrate its expressiveness through the aforementioned debugging techniques, and finally demonstrate that it can be used to detect real bugs using case studies of three bugs based on the development of the LiteOS operating system.

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  1. Declarative tracepoints: a programmable and application independent debugging system for wireless sensor networks

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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
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      Published: 05 November 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. declarative tracepoints
      2. embedded debugging
      3. wireless sensor networks

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      • (2024)Language-Agnostic Debugging for MicrocontrollersProceedings of the 2nd ACM International Workshop on Future Debugging Techniques10.1145/3678720.3685317(22-27)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
      • (2023)Formal modeling of industrial wireless applicationsEnergy Systems10.1007/s12667-023-00599-815:4(1493-1510)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
      • (2020)Detection and Prevention of Black Hole Attack Using Trusted and Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor NetworkHybrid Intelligent Systems10.1007/978-3-030-49336-3_30(299-308)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2020
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      • (2019)Secure Multipath Routing for Efficient Load Balancing and Jamming Attack ProtectionSoft Computing for Problem Solving10.1007/978-981-15-0184-5_60(705-716)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2019
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