TinyGALS: A Programming Model for Event-Driven Embedded Systems


Researchers: Elaine Cheong
Jie Liu
Advisor:Edward A. Lee

Networked embedded systems such as wireless sensor networks are usually designed to be event-driven so that they are reactive and power-efficient. Programming embedded systems with multiple reactive tasks is difficult due to the complex nature of managing the concurrency of execution threads and consistency of shared states.

We have designed a globally asynchronous and locally synchronous model, called TinyGALS, for programming event-driven embedded systems [1]. Software components are composed locally through synchronous method calls to form modules, and asynchronous message passing is used between modules to separate the flow of control. In addition, we have designed a guarded yet synchronous model, TinyGUYS, which allows thread-safe sharing of global state by multiple modules without explicitly passing messages. Our notions of synchrony and asynchrony, which are consistent with the usage of these terms in distributed programming paradigms, refer to whether the software flow of control is immediately transferred to a component.

With this highly structured programming model, all asynchronous message passing code and module triggering mechanisms can be automatically generated from a high-level specification. The programming model and code generation facilities have been implemented for a wireless sensor network platform known as the Berkeley motes. TinyOS is an event-based operating system for these networked sensors being developed by the group of Prof. David Culler. Our implementation of TinyGALS uses the component model provided by TinyOS, which has an interface abstraction that is consistent with synchronous method calls. The TinyGALS code generator is designed to work with preexisting TinyOS components, thus enabling code reuse.

We are currently working on formalizing the dynamic properties of TinyGALS, as well as developing a more robust implementation for communication and scheduling. TinyGALS is currently intended for running on a single node. We later plan to extend the TinyGALS model to multiple nodes for distributed multi-tasking.

[1]
E. Cheong, J. Liebman, J. Liu, F. Zhao, "TinyGALS: A Programming Model for Event-Driven Embedded Systems," in Proc. of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'03), Melbourne, FL, Mar. 9-12, 2003.

Last updated 11/18/02