Standardized Hardware Independent Framework for Active Sensing

We propose to implement a platform based on the .NET Micro Framework (MF) for mote-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Active Tag Networks (ATNs). The resulting middleware would significantly simplify the development of applications on these systems, both by providing a hardware-independent, high-level, development environment and by providing standard implementations for essential services. This effort has the potential to have large impact, because software complexity remains the major impediment to more rapid transition of the numerous research results on WSNs to mainstream users. In Phase I, we demonstrated the ability to port Version 3 of the MF to third party hardware and, in Phase II, we will port Version 4 to our own hardware. Our experience has engendered confidence that the MF is at least as open, as powerful, and as portable, as Java or Dalvik, and that creating motes and mote-scale systems based on the MF has a potentially large market impact. The work plan is divided into three roughly equal sections: 1) development of a .NET MF hardware and software platform, 2) development of the middleware, and 3) development of a prototype management system for micro-depots based on an ATN.