Wireless Sensor Networks Blog

From Crossbow’s blog:

Recently I have come across a very interesting research project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This project called LiteOS is being developed in the Computer Science Department by Professor Tarek Abdelzaher and his student Qing Cao. The goal is to provide a UNIX like operating and development environment for motes and sensor networks. A prototype implementation has been completed for the MICAz Mote. It includes an object oriented (C++ based) programming environment as well as run-time support for dynamic loading and execution of multiple threads. In addition, a file system which will be familiar to Unix/Linux users is provided as well.

The LiteOS environment consists of a PC based shell application and the Mote based runtime and file system routines. The shell implements a subset of UNIX commands such as Is, mkdir, ps, man, etc. These commands are used to interact with the file system and for process execution management. To install an application the user simply copies its executable to the file system on the target node. Remote files and directories are intuitively mapped into a network hierarchy tree. Changing the current working directory to the remote node transparently maps installation and execution commands to that node.