Networked and Distributed Embedded Systems Technology

Researchers:	Elaine Cheong
	Yang Zhao
Advisor:	Edward A. Lee

We consider networked embedded systems, where computers with sensors and actuators communicate via CAN bus, ethernet, bluetooth, or other networking technology. These systems can be event-triggered or time-triggered. The network can be reliable (e.g. CAN bus) or ad-hoc (e.g. smart dust). We are exploring two types of systems: time-triggered distributed systems and event-triggered networked systems.

Giotto is a programming methodology being developed by the group of Prof. Tom Henzinger. It aims at hard real-time applications with periodic behavior, especially distributed embedded control systems with reliable networks. We are interested in modeling these types of applications in Ptolemy with Giotto semantics and generating code for arbitrary embedded platforms.

TinyOS is an event-based operating system for networked sensors being developed by the group of Prof. David Culler. It supports ad-hoc networking and is designed to support the concurrency intensive operations required by networked sensors with minimal hardware requirements. We are interested in formalizing its programming model in a Ptolemy domain and exploring how to build larger models on top of it. The TinyOS platform is an ideal testbed for code generation because of the severe memory and processing limitations inherent in the system.

Last updated 11/18/02