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NSDI '05 — Abstract

Active Sensor Networks

Philip Levis, University of California, Berkeley; David Gay, Intel Research Berkeley; David Culler, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

We propose using application specific virtual machines (ASVMs) to reprogram deployed wireless sensor networks. ASVMs provide a way for a user to define an application-specific boundary between virtual code and the VM engine. This allows programs to be very concise (tens to hundreds of bytes), making program installation fast and inexpensive. Additionally, concise programs interpret few instructions, imposing very little interpretation overhead. We evaluate ASVMs against current proposals for network programming runtimes and show that ASVMs are more energy efficient by as much as 20%. We also evaluate ASVMs against hand built TinyOS applications and show that while interpretation imposes a significant execution overhead, the low duty cycles of realistic applications make the actual cost effectively unmeasurable.
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Last changed: 9 June 2005 rc
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