Evaluating A BASIC Approach to Sensor Network Node Programming J. Scott Miller Peter A. Dinda Robert P. Dick
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Northwestern University Northwestern University University of Michigan Abstract 1 Introduction Sensor networks have the potential to empower domain Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be viewed as experts from a wide range of fields. However, presently they general purpose distributed computing platforms defined by are notoriously difficult for these domain experts to program, their spatial presence and an emphasis on environment mon- even though their applications are often conceptually simple. itoring. The most prominent applications of sensor networks We address this problem by applying the BASIC program- have thus far included monitoring applications with a variety ming language to sensor networks and evaluating its effec- of requirements, although WSNs need not be limited to these tiveness. BASIC has proven highly successful in the past in tasks. While WSNs are currently of great research interest, it allowing novices to write useful programs on home comput- is ultimately communities and users outside of these areas— ers. Our contributions include a user study evaluating how application domain experts—that have the most to gain from well novice (no programming experience) and intermediate the functionality that WSNs can provide. We focus on ap- (some programming experience) users can accomplish sim- plication domain experts who are programming novices and ple sensor network tasks in BASIC and in TinyScript (a prin- not WSN experts. Our goal is to make the development of cipally event-driven high-level language for node-oriented WSN applications by such individuals and groups tractable programming) and an evaluation of power consumption is- and, ideally, straightforward.