Toward easily analyzable sensor networks via structuring of time-triggered tasks

Software techniques which enable efficient construction of sensor networks that are easily analyzable and can rarely run into a chaotic situation are in high demands. With the motivation for developing such software techniques, a skeleton of a software architecture for sensor networks which uses time-triggered functions (TTFs) extensively has been formulated. The TTF is a fundamental building-block for software which realizes global time based coordination of distributed actions (TCoDA). TDMA communication is adopted and harmonious joining of a sensor node into an existing cooperating group of sensor nodes is facilitated. Approaches for supporting preemptive TTFs by use of a multi-threading OS kernel as well as the approaches for supporting non-preemptive TTFs by use of application-level components are also presented. The latter approaches were devised for the situations where incentives for avoiding the use of a multi-threading OS would exist.