Incremental network programming for wireless sensors

We present an incremental network programming mechanism which re programs wireless sensors quickly by transmitting the incremental changes for the new program version. Using the Rsync algorithm we generate the difference of the two program images, which allows us to distribute just the key changes of the program. Unlike previous approaches, our design does not assume any prior knowledge of the program code structure and can be applied to any hardware platform. To meet the resource constraints of wireless sensors we tuned the Rsync algorithm which was originally made for updating binary files among computationally powerful machines. In our design, the sensor node processes the delivery and the decoding of the difference script in separate steps. This makes it easy to extend for multi-hop network programming. We are able to achieve the speedup of 9.1 for changing a constant and 2.1 to 2.5 for changing a few lines in the source code over the non-incremental delivery.