Overview

Over the past four years, CENS systems research efforts in operating systems and networking have contributed to a thorough understanding of the lower-level components of embedded networked sensing software. Our focus has now shifted towards higher-level software systems: programming systems and tools, coherent network architectures, secure subsystems, and network monitoring systems. This trend in systems research parallels the development of the Internet. In the early years, much of the Internet development was focused on designing the routing and transport layers to support simple applications such as e-mail and FTP. The advent of the Web really pushed systems research towards Web programming, content distribution and management, and networked databases. These higher-level software systems are crucial to the development of ENS toolkits, re-usable systems software that makes it easy to program, deploy and adapt large-scale fielded systems.

This report section opens with a discussion of new application and technology drivers for systems research. Specifically, the first two sections discuss the SlogViz and Cyclops systems that are exploring application-driven data modeling and visualization, and low-power distributed image sensing respectively. In the next four sections the report explores software tools focusing on simulation and source monitoring (Avrora), programming of global behaviors (Kairos), static checking of programming errors (Staged Checkers), and software architecture for tiered systems (Tenet). The final two sections of the report focus on research in system robustness, both in context of security and trust issues, and debugging of failures (Sympathy).