Incremental Network Programming for Wireless Sensors

Abstract

We present an incremental network programming mechanism which reprograms wireless sensors quickly by transmitting the incremental changes using the Rsync algorithm; we generate the difference of the two program images allowing us to distribute only the key changes. 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 To meet the resource constraints of wireless sensors, we tuned the Rsync algorithm which was originally made for updating binary files among powerful host machines. The sensor node processes the delivery and the decoding of the difference script separately making it easy to extend for multi-hop network programming. We are able to get a speed-up of 9.1 for changing a constant and 2.1 to 2.5 for changing a few lines in the source code.