Towards energy-efficient code dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Post-deployment code dissemination has become an important design issue for many applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While several dissemination protocols have been proposed, challenges still exist due to the high energy consumption of transmitting wireless signals. In this paper, we present update-conscious compilation (UCC) techniques for energy-efficient code dissemination in WSNs. An update-conscious compiler, when compiling the modified code, includes the compilation decisions that were made when generating the old binary. In most cases, matching the previous decisions improves the binary code similarity, reduces the amount of data to be transmitted to remote sensors, and thus, consumes less energy. In this paper, we focus on the development of update-conscious register allocation (UCC-RA) algorithms. Our experimental results show that UCC-RA can achieve great improvements over the traditional, update-oblivious approaches.