Project Overview

Project Abstract

Developers of networked embedded systems often find it difficult to diagnose bugs. A key observation is that in such systems, it can be beneficial to exploit domain knowledge about events in the physical world to detect failures. For example, in a sensor network deployment, knowing that the received signal strength of a radio transmission will normally decrease over distance, the application developer can enforce runtime checks to detect faulty nodes based on their relative distances to the source and the orderings of their received signal strength.

Based on this intuition, this project addresses the challenge of developing correct, resilient, and reliable networked embedded systems by (i) proposing, developing, and evaluating a methodology of using physical events to detect software bugs, (ii) developing software libraries and APIs to facilitate easy access to physical event constraints by application developers, and (iii) evaluating the effectiveness of the software libraries using real-world applications.

The completed framework could significantly reduce the debugging and maintenance costs for complicated networked embedded systems, and improve their reliability. Beyond such direct social and economic benefits, the broader impacts of this work include: (i) improving curriculum with hands-on debugging sessions; (ii) raising interest in technology among high school seniors through a Pre-Collegiate Research Scholars Program; (iii) supporting talented female and under-represented minority PhD students to successfully accomplish their doctoral studies; (iv) disseminating research results through high-quality publications, high-profile tutorials, and open-source sites.

People


Faculty

Dr. Qing Cao at UTK
Dr. Tian He at UMN
Dr. Xiaorui Wang at OSU

Student Participants

 Jilong Liao (Master Student at UTK)
Lipeng Wan (PhD Student at UTK)
Kefa Lu (Master Student at UTK)
Yanjun Yao (Ph.D. Student at UTK)
Desheng Zhang (Ph.D. Student at UMN)
Shuai Wang (Ph.D. Student at UMN)
Zhirong Ding (Ph.D. Student at OSU)

Outcomes

Published Papers (pdfs are available by clicking on the title)

2014
  1. Jilong Liao, Zhibo Wang, Lipeng Wan, Qing Cao, and Hairong Qi. Smart Diary: A Smartphone-based Framework for Sensing, Inferring and Logging Users’ Daily Life. IEEE Sensors Journal, accepted.
  2. Yanjun Yao, Qing Cao, and Athanasios V. Vasilakos. EDAL: an Energy-efficient, Delay-aware, and Lifetime-balancing Data Collection Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks.  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), accepted.  
  3. Sisi Xiong, Yanjun Yao, Qing Cao, and Tian He.  kBF: a Bloom Filter for Key-Value Storage with an Application on Approximate State Machines. In Proceedings of the Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM),  2014, to appear.

2013
  1. Shuo Guo, Heng Zhang, Ziguo Zhong, Jiming Chen, Qing Cao and Tian He. Detecting Faulty Nodes with Data Errors for Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM Transaction on Wireless Sensor Networks (TOSN), 2013, to appear.
  2. Yanjun Yao, Qing Cao, and Athanasios V. Vasilakos. EDAL: Energy-efficient, Delay-aware, and Lifetime-balancing Data Collection Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, In Proceedings of the Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Oct, 2013.
  3. Jilong Liao, Kefa Lu, Qing Cao. Uno: A Privacy-Aware Distributed Storage and Replication Middleware for Heterogeneous Computing Platforms, In Proceedings of the Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Oct, 2013.
  4. Lipeng Wan, Qing Cao.  Towards Instruction Level Record and Replay of Sensor Network Applications, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and
    Telecommunication Systems (IEEE MASCOTS), 2013.
2012

  1. Yongle Cao, Shuo Guo and Tian He. Robust Multi-Pipeline Scheduling in Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE INFOCOM, 2012.
  2. Kefa Lu, Qing Cao, Michael Thomason.  Bugs or Anomalies? Sequence Mining Based Debugging in Wireless Sensor Networks.  In Proceedings of the Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Oct, 2012.
  3. Yanjun Yao, Lipeng Wan, and Qing Cao. System Architecture and Operating Systems for Wireless Sensor Networks, book chapter, to appear in the Art of Senosr Networks, Springer, accepted in 2012, to be published in 2013-2014