Impala: a middleware system for managing autonomic, parallel sensor systems

ABSTRACT

Sensor networks are long-running computer systems with many sensing/compute nodes working to gather information about their environment, process and fuse that information, and in some cases, actuate control mechanisms in response. Like traditional parallel systems, communication between nodes is of fundamental importance, but is typically accomplished via wireless transceivers. One further key attribute of sensor networks is that they are almost always long running systems, intended to operate in situ, with minimal direct human intervention, for months or years. This requirement for long-running autonomy mandates careful design of the runtime system that manages applications on each node, to ensure reliability and ease of upgrades over the life of the system.This paper describes Impala, a middleware architecture that enables application modularity, adaptivity, and repair-ability in wireless sensor networks. Impala allows software updates to be received via the node's wireless transceiver and to be applied to the running system dynamically. In addition, Impala also provides an interface for on-the-fly application adaptation in order to improve the performance, energy-efficiency, and reliability of the software system. Impala has been designed to be a part of the ZebraNet mobile sensor network, but we are also prototyping it within HP/Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC handhelds. We present performance data for both real system measurements of the Pocket PC version as well as simulations of a full mobile sensor system deployment. Overall, Impala is a lightweight runtime system that can greatly improve system reliability, performance, and energy-efficiency. The ideas introduced here for sensor networks have applicability more broadly in other long-running autonomous parallel systems as well.

REFERENCES

• 1: Rimon Barr , John C. Bicket , Daniel S. Dantas , Bowei Du , T. W. Danny Kim , Bing Zhou , Emin Gün Sirer, On the need for system-level support for ad hoc and sensor networks, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.36 n.2, p.1-5, April 2002 [doi>10.1145/509526.509528]
• 2: John B. Carter , John K. Bennett , Willy Zwaenepoel, Implementation and performance of Munin, Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.152-164, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, California, United States
• 3: Alberto Cerpa , Jeremy Elson , Michael Hamilton , Jerry Zhao , Deborah Estrin , Lewis Girod, Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communications technology, Workshop on Data communication in Latin America and the Caribbean, p.20-41, April 2001, San Jose, Costa Rica [doi>10.1145/371626.371720]
• 4: R. J. Clark, M. Ammar, and K. Calvert. Multi-Protocol Architecture as a Paradigm for Achieving Inter-Operability. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Apr. 1993.
• 5: The Familiar Project. http://familiar.handhelds.org/.
• 6: John Heidemann , Fabio Silva , Chalermek Intanagonwiwat , Ramesh Govindan , Deborah Estrin , Deepak Ganesan, Building efficient wireless sensor networks with low-level naming, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 21-24, 2001, Banff, Alberta, Canada
• 7: Jason Hill , Robert Szewczyk , Alec Woo , Seth Hollar , David Culler , Kristofer Pister, System architecture directions for networked sensors, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.93-104, November 2000, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 8: Chalermek Intanagonwiwat , Ramesh Govindan , Deborah Estrin, Directed diffusion: a scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.56-67, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345920]
• 9: D. Johnson and D. Maltz. Dynamic Source Routing in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks. In T. Imielinski and H. Korth, editors, Mobile Computing, pages 153--181. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
• 10: Philo Juang , Hidekazu Oki , Yong Wang , Margaret Martonosi , Li Shiuan Peh , Daniel Rubenstein, Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, October 05-09, 2002, San Jose, California
• 11: J. M. Kahn , R. H. Katz , K. S. J. Pister, Next century challenges: mobile networking for “Smart Dust”, Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.271-278, August 15-19, 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/313451.313558]
• 12: Philip Levis , David Culler, Maté: a tiny virtual machine for sensor networks, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, October 05-09, 2002, San Jose, California
• 13: S.-F. Li, R. Sutton, and J. Rabaey. Low Power Operating System for Heterogeneous Wireless Communication Systems. In PACT 01 Conference, Sept. 2001.
• 14: Microsoft Corp. Microsoft Windows CE. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsce/embedded/.
• 15: Palm Corp. Palm OS 5 Development Overview. http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/docs/palmos50/.
• 16: Charles E. Perkins , Elizabeth M. Royer, Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computer Systems and Applications, p.90, February 25-26, 1999
• 17: G. J. Pottie , W. J. Kaiser, Wireless integrated network sensors, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.5, p.51-58, May 2000 [doi>10.1145/332833.332838]
• 18: An Architecture Overview of QNX. http://www.qnx.com/literature/whitepapers/archoverview.html.
• 19: Amit Sinha , Anantha Chandrakasan, Operating System and Algorithmic Techniques for Energy Scalable Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Mobile Data Management, p.199-209, January 08-10, 2001
• 20: David L. Tennenhouse , David J. Wetherall, Towards an active network architecture, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.26 n.2, p.5-17, April 1996 [doi>10.1145/231699.231701]
• 21: VxWorks 5.4 Datasheet. http://www.windriver.com/products/html/vxwks54_ds.html.
• 22: D. J. Wetherall, J. V. Guttag, and D. L. Tennenhouse. ANTS: A Toolkit for Building and Dynamically Deploying Network Protocols. In IEEE OPENARCH, Apr. 1998.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Modules and interfaces
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems; Real-time systems and embedded systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
middleware system, sensor networks, software adaptation, software update