Lightweight Deployable Software Monitoring for Sensor Networks

Most efforts at analyzing the behavior and performance of sensor network software have been simulation-based, but deployment in the field can bring about conditions that were unexpected, or just too hard to simulate. Thus monitoring the software in the field would be a valuable capability for engineering of sensor networks. We have developed a lightweight instrumentation tool for TinyOS, called LlMOW, that is deploy- able onto sensor hardware, is low cost in overhead, and is configurable and controllable in terms of how much it monitors and how much overhead is tolerable. We show both behavioral and timing results from our tool, and compare results with other monitoring approaches.