Moore's law has led to a new class of computing device, wireless sensor networks. Made up of many nodes, most of which have very limited energy and resources, sensor networks have the potential to transform a wide range of fields, such as structural health monitoring, resource management, scientific research, and public health. This different application pull, combined with extreme power limitations, leads a sensor node operating system to take very different approaches than traditional computing classes.
Over the past few years, TinyOS has grown from a small research project to the dominant operating system for low power wireless sensor networks. In this tutorial, we will detail TinyOS and how the novel constraints of sensor networks led to its design. Beginning with early versions, we will describe how the open source TinyOS project has evolved in the past and its future directions, such as the formation of an open TinyOS alliance made up of industry and academics and the formation of working groups to tackle technical challenges the community faces. We will cover the role TinyOS plays in current deployed sensor networks, the emerging network architecture within the TinyOS cloud, and what implications these clouds have on current and future Internet systems.
Slides:
Download the slides for Phil Levis' talk in PDF format.
About the speaker:
Philip Alexander Levis is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He researches wireless sensor network systems, protocols, and languages. His work, used by thousands of research groups worldwide, includes the TinyOS operating system, the Maté application specific virtual machine framework, the nesC language, dissemination protocols, the TOSSIM simulator, and sensor network architectures.
Contact information:
Philip Alexander Levis
Computer Systems Laboratory
Stanford University