Article

Protothreads: simplifying event-driven programming of memory-constrained embedded systems

Authors:

Oliver Schmidt,

Muneeb AliAuthors Info & Claims

SenSys '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems

Pages 29 - 42

https://doi.org/10.1145/1182807.1182811

Published: 31 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Event-driven programming is a popular model for writing programs for tiny embedded systems and sensor network nodes. While event-driven programming can keep the memory overhead down, it enforces a state machine programming style which makes many programs difficult to write, maintain, and debug. We present a novel programming abstraction called protothreads that makes it possible to write event-driven programs in a thread-like style, with a memory overhead of only two bytes per protothread. We show that protothreads significantly reduce the complexity of a number of widely used programs previously written with event-driven state machines. For the examined programs the majority of the state machines could be entirely removed. In the other cases the number of states and transitions was drastically decreased. With protothreads the number of lines of code was reduced by one third. The execution time overhead of protothreads is on the order of a few processor cycles.

References

[1]

T. Abdelzaher, J. Stankovic, S. Son, B. Blum, T. He, A. Wood, and C. Lu. A communication architecture and programming abstractions for real-time embedded sensor networks. In Workshop on Data Distribution for Real-Time Systems, Providence, RI, USA, May 2003.]]

[2]

H. Abrach, S. Bhatti, J. Carlson, H. Dai, J. Rose, A. Sheth, B. Shucker, J. Deng, and R. Han. Mantis: system support for multimodal networks of insitu sensors. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international conference on Wireless sensor networks and applications, pages 50--59, 2003.]]

Digital Library

[3]

A. Adya, J. Howell, M. Theimer, W.J. Bolosky, and J.R. Douceur. Cooperative Task Management Without Manual Stack Management. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[4]

E. Cheong, J. Liebman, J. Liu, and F. Zhao. TinyGALS: A programming model for event-driven embedded systems. In Proc. of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'03), Melbourne, Florida, USA, March 2003.]]

Digital Library

[5]

R. Cunningham and E. Kohler. Making events less slippery with eel. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-X), Santa Fee, New Mexico, June 2005. IEEE Computer Society.]]

Digital Library

[6]

F. Dabek, N. Zeldovich, F. Kaashoek, D. Mazières, and R. Morris. Event-driven programming for robust software. In Proceedings of the 2002 SIGOPS European Workshop, Saint-Emilion, France, September 2002.]]

Digital Library

[7]

A.L. de Moura and R. Ierusalimschy. Revisiting coroutines. MCC 15/04, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, June 2004.]]

[8]

T. Duff. Unwinding loops. Usenet news article, net.lang.c, MessageID: <[email protected]>, May 1984.]]

[9]

A. Dunkels. Protothreads web site. Web page. Visited 2006-04-06. http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/]]

[10]

A. Dunkels. Full TCP/IP for 8-bit architectures. In Proceedings of The First International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys `03), May 2003.]]

Digital Library

[11]

A. Dunkels, N. Finne, J. Eriksson, and T. Voigt. Run-time dynamic linking for reprogramming wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SenSys 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 2006.A. Dunkels, N. Finne, J. Eriksson, and T. Voigt. Run-time dynamic linking for reprogramming wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SenSys 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 2006.]]

Digital Library

[12]

A. Dunkels, B. Grönvall, and T. Voigt. Contiki - a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors. In Proceedings of the First IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, Tampa, Florida, USA, November 2004.]]

Digital Library

[13]

A. Dunkels, O. Schmidt, and T. Voigt. Using protothreads for sensor node programming. In Proc. of the Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks (REALWSN'05), Stockholm, Sweden, June 2005.]]

[14]

J. Ganssle. The embedded muse. Monthly newsletter. http://www.ganssle.com/tem-back.htm]]

[15]

D. Gay, P. Levis, R. von Behren, M. Welsh, E. Brewer, and D. Culler. The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, pages 1--11, 2003.]]

Digital Library

[16]

R. Gummadi, O. Gnawali, and R. Govindan. Macro-programming wireless sensor networks using kairos. In Proc. of Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS)'05, Marina del Rey, CA, USA, June 2005.]]

Digital Library

[17]

C. Han, R.K. Rengaswamy, R. Shea, E. Kohler, and M. Srivastava. Sos: A dynamic operating system for sensor networks. In MobiSys '05: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, 2005.]]

Digital Library

[18]

D. Harel. Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems. Sci. Comput. Program., 8(3):231--274, 1987.]]

Digital Library

[19]

J. Hill, R. Szewczyk, A. Woo, S. Hollar, D. Culler, and K. Pister. System architecture directions for networked sensors. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, November 2000.]]

Digital Library

[20]

J. Jeong. Analysis of xnp network reprogramming module. Web page, October 2003. Visited 2006-04-06. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jaein/cs294 1/xnp anal.htm]]

[21]

O. Kasten and K. Römer. Beyond event handlers: Programming wireless sensors with attributed state machines. In The Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Los Angeles, USA, April 2005.]]

Digital Library

[22]

D.E. Knuth. The art of computer programming, volume 1: fundamental algorithms (2nd edition). Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1978.]]

Digital Library

[23]

Framework Labs. Protothreads for Objective-C/Cocoa. Visited 2006-04-06. http://www.frameworklabs.de/protothreads.html]]

[24]

H.C. Lauer and R.M. Needham. On the duality of operating systems structures. In Proc. Second International Symposium on Operating Systems, October 1978.]]

[25]

P. Levis and D. Culler. Mate: A tiny virtual machine for sensor networks. In Proceedings of ASPLOS-X, San Jose, CA, USA, October 2002.]]

Digital Library

[26]

P. Levis, S. Madden, D. Gay, J. Polastre, R. Szewczyk, A. Woo, E. Brewer, and D. Culler. The Emergence of Networking Abstractions and Techniques in TinyOS. In Proc. NSDI'04, March 2004.]]

Digital Library

[27]

S.R. Madden, M.J. Franklin, J.M. Hellerstein, and W. Hong. Tinydb: an acquisitional query processing system for sensor networks. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 30(1):122--173, 2005.]]

Digital Library

[28]

M. Melkonian. Get by Without an RTOS. Embedded Systems Programming, 13(10), September 2000.]]

[29]

R. Newton, Arvind, and M. Welsh. Building up to macroprogramming: An intermediate language for sensor networks. In Proc. IPSN'05, Los Angeles, CA, USA, April 2005.]]

Digital Library

[30]

J. Paisley and J. Sventek. Real-time detection of grid bulk transfer traffic. In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations Management Symposium, 2006.]]

[31]

J.C. Reynolds. The discoveries of continuations. Lisp Symbol. Comput., 6(3):233--247, 1993.]]

Digital Library

[32]

Z.B. Simpson. State machines: Cooperative mini-kernels with yielding. In Computer Game Developer's Conference, Austin, TX, November 1999.]]

[33]

S. Tatham. Coroutines in C. Web page, 2000. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html]]

[34]

T. van Dam and K. Langendoen. An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the first international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, pages 171--180, 2003.]]

Digital Library

[35]

R. von Behren, J. Condit, and E. Brewer. Why events are a bad idea (for high-concurrency servers). In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, May 2003.]]

Digital Library

[36]

R. von Behren, J. Condit, F. Zhou, G.C. Necula, and E. Brewer. Capriccio: scalable threads for internet services. In Proc. SOSP '03, pages 268--281, 2003.]]

Digital Library

[37]

M. Welsh and G. Mainland. Programming sensor networks using abstract regions. In Proc. USENIX/ACM NSDI'04, San Francisco, CA, March 2004.]]

Digital Library

Cited By

Minin P(2024)Unified Processing of Events and Co-routines in Embedded ProgramProgramming and Computer Software10.1134/S036176882470015450:5(343-355)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768824700154
Scholl PSutton FSommer P(2024)Secure On-The-Fly Firmware Updates for Safety Critical Embedded Systems2024 IEEE 29th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA)10.1109/ETFA61755.2024.10711047(1-7)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ETFA61755.2024.10711047
George YSarkar A(2023)A Distributed Algorithmic Approach for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping With Acoustic SensorsProceedings of the 2023 6th International Conference on Advances in Robotics10.1145/3610419.3610446(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610419.3610446
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Protothreads: simplifying event-driven programming of memory-constrained embedded systems
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

Recommendations

A comprehensive compiler-assisted thread abstraction for resource-constrained systems
IPSN '13: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks

While size and complexity of sensor networks software has increased significantly in recent years, the hardware capabilities of sensor nodes have been remaining very constrained. The predominant event-based programming paradigm addresses these hardware ...
Design and Implementation of a Firmware Update Protocol for Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks WSNs require an automated firmware updating protocol for adding new features or error fixes. Reprogramming nodes manually is often impractical or even impossible. Current update protocols require a large ...
Energy-balanced sampling workload allocation in wireless sensor networks

The quality of a wireless sensor network application is often measured by the number of samples collected in a period of time. Examples include debris flow monitoring systems, flood warning system and so on. In many situations, the number of collected ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SenSys '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems

October 2006

444 pages

ISBN:1595933433

DOI:10.1145/1182807

General Chair:
Andrew Campbell
Dartmouth University
,
Program Chairs:
Philippe Bonnet
University of Copenhagen (DIKU), Denmark
,
John Heidemann
University of Southern California/ISI, USA

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 October 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SenSys06

Sponsor:

SenSys06: ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems

October 31 - November 3, 2006

Colorado, Boulder, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 867 submissions, 20%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

230
Total Citations
View Citations
2,497
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)78
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Minin P(2024)Unified Processing of Events and Co-routines in Embedded ProgramProgramming and Computer Software10.1134/S036176882470015450:5(343-355)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1134/S0361768824700154
Scholl PSutton FSommer P(2024)Secure On-The-Fly Firmware Updates for Safety Critical Embedded Systems2024 IEEE 29th International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA)10.1109/ETFA61755.2024.10711047(1-7)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ETFA61755.2024.10711047
George YSarkar A(2023)A Distributed Algorithmic Approach for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping With Acoustic SensorsProceedings of the 2023 6th International Conference on Advances in Robotics10.1145/3610419.3610446(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610419.3610446
Mousavi HEbnenasir AMahmoudzadeh E(2023)Formal Specification, Verification and Repair of Contiki’s SchedulerACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems10.1145/36059487:4(1-28)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605948
Ma ZZhong L(2023)Bringing Segmented Stacks to Embedded SystemsProceedings of the 24th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications10.1145/3572864.3580344(117-123)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572864.3580344
Tan XHakala I(2023)StateOS: A Memory-Efficient Hybrid Operating System for IoT DevicesIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2023.323410610:11(9523-9533)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2023.3234106
Wang KWang K(2023)Models of Embedded SystemsEmbedded and Real-Time Operating Systems10.1007/978-3-031-28701-5_4(99-114)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28701-5_4
Karaduman BOakes BEslampanah RDenil JVangheluwe HChallenger M(2022)An Architecture and Reference Implementation for WSN-Based IoT SystemsEmerging Trends in IoT and Integration with Data Science, Cloud Computing, and Big Data Analytics10.4018/978-1-7998-4186-9.ch005(80-103)Online publication date: 2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-4186-9.ch005
Burman SGao JPasternack GFangue NCadrett PCampbell EGhosal D(2022)TempMesh – A Flexible Wireless Sensor Network for Monitoring River TemperaturesACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/354269719:1(1-28)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3542697
Bradbury MJhumka AWatson TFlores DBurton JButler M(2022)Threat-modeling-guided Trust-based Task Offloading for Resource-constrained Internet of ThingsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/351042418:2(1-41)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510424
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents