Run-time dynamic linking for reprogramming wireless sensor networks

From experience with wireless sensor networks it has become apparent that dynamic reprogramming of the sensor nodes is a useful feature. The resource constraints in terms of energy, memory, and processing power make sensor network reprogramming a challenging task. Many different mechanisms for reprogramming sensor nodes have been developed ranging from full image replacement to virtual machines.We have implemented an in-situ run-time dynamic linker and loader that use the standard ELF object file format. We show that run-time dynamic linking is an effective method for reprogramming even resource constrained wireless sensor nodes. To evaluate our dynamic linking mechanism we have implemented an application-specific virtual machine and a Java virtual machine and compare the energy cost of the different linking and execution models. We measure the energy consumption and execution time overhead on real hardware to quantify the energy costs for dynamic linkin.Our results suggest that while in general the overhead of a virtual machine is high, a combination of native code and virtual machine code provide good energy efficiency. Dynamic run-time linking can be used to update the native code, even in heterogeneous networks.

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