A file system for system programming in ubiquitous computing

In Ubiquitous computing, small embedded sensor and computing nodes are the main enabling technologies. System programming for such small embedded systems is a challenging task involving various hardware components with different characteristics. This paper presents a file system which organizes all computational and sensory functionality of a sensor node as resources in a uniform name space. It further provides a lightweight and uniform access model for all these resources. This mechanism forms an abstraction from different hardware, makes functions re-useable and simplifies the development on such systems. With ParticleFS a concrete file system implementation on a sensor node platform is shown. Application cases demonstrate sensor logging, an interactive shell, executables, a pipe mechanism and remote access capabilities of the ParticleFS.