Sensor Network Motes : Portability & Performance Ph

This dissertation describes our efforts to improve sensor network performance evaluation and portability, within the context of the sensor network project Hogthrob. In Hogthrob, we faced the challenge of building a sensor network architecture for sowmonitoring. This application has hard requirements on price and performance, and shows great potential for using sensor networks. Throughout the project we let the application requirements guide our design choices, leading us to push the technologies further to meet the specific goal of the application. In this dissertation, we attack two key areas related to the design of this solution. We found the current state of the art within performance evaluation to be inadequate and that the moving to the next generation platforms is being held back by practical issues in porting existing software. We have taken a pragmatic, experimental approach to investigate these challenges and apart from developing the methodologies, we also present the results of our experiments. In particular, we present a new vector based methodology for performance evaluation of sensor network devices (motes) and applications, based on application specific benchmarking. In addition, we present our results from porting the highly popular sensor network operating system TinyOS to a new and emerging system on a chip based platform. Moving the sensor network field towards the use of systemon-a-chip devices has large potential in terms of price and performance. We claim to have advanced the current state of the art of sensor networks within the two key areas: portability and performance.