| In recent years, the growing popularity of sensor networks and very low-power devices have led to the introduction of a variety of light-weight operating systems and software frameworks for embedded systems. The existence of interactive runtime frameworks that support remote procedure calls (RPC) and remote firmware updates within such networks has become a necessity. As applications of sensor networks expand and more variety is introduced into the system, existing infrastructures, which are often protocol specific and optimized for specific design scenarios, have difficulty adapting to a large, diverse network. In this thesis, we introduce an infrastructure that can support large sensor networks consisting of multiple network domains and end users (clients), all utilizing a unified URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)-based addressing scheme. The proposed design simultaneously supports multiple communication protocols and a variety of hardware platforms and firmware updating strategies. We explored the functionalities of the developed system by utilizing a commercial off-the-shelf microcontroller, utilizing the Freescale MQX RTOS and a new code-replacement strategy that can properly work within pre-existing runtime frameworks such as MQX. We demonstrate that the proposed system can not only provide interactive execution and firmware updating within large multi-domain, multi-user infrastructures, but also utilize a flexible architecture that substantially reduces development time for embedded systems. |
