Verification and Power Analysis of an Event-Based System (TinyOS) and Sensor Network with Hybrid Automata

The advances in digital circuitry and sensor technology has enabled reliable monitoring of environments through wireless microsensor systems. Event-driven operating system has been shown to meet the requirements of such platforms. In this paper, we focus on TinyOS, an eventbased operating system for Smart Dust networked sensors. We show how to model TinyOS as a hybrid automata with the tool HyTech and verify the correct operation of the system by using safety verification feature of HyTech. Since lifetime is a important metric for sensor nodes that are planned to be deployed once and unattended for long periods of time without maintenance, we perform power analysis of a sensor node by using trace generation feature of HyTech. Furthermore, we simulate a tree sensor network of TinyOS motes by using the programming language SHIFT to determine the lifetime of the network as a function of the distance from the central data collector. Keywords—TinyOS, Sensor Networks, Power Consumption, HyTech, SHIFT, Hybrid Automata, Verification, Modelling.