SNAP - Sensor Network Application Plugin

This paper presents SNAP, Sensor Network Application Plugin. It consists of a collection of C++ classes that wrap around TinyOS’s [5] system components and a macro PLUGIN to instantiate the application. With this architecture, it is shown that writing embedded code for Sensor Networks is not much different than writing an ordinary C++ code using multiple inheritance. The process of learning a new language is avoided. Like TinyOS, applications using SNAP would include pertinent components only into the final executables. The size of final executables is only about 0.8K larger in average than the ones written in C. However, the application code using SNAP is much shorter, concise and easier to understand. Another advantage of using this architecture (the PLUGIN macro to be specific) is the forward compatibility which allows the same set of applications become plugins in the future on supported hardware and software by simply recompiling them without any