BSN Programming Made Easy

The Pervasive Sensing Team from the Hamlyn Centre at Imperial release the Beta version of the BSN Platform.

nesC, tinyOS, Contiki, Mantis, t-Kernel, LiteOS, RETOS, and SOS! 

 Worried about complicated sensor node programming is distracting you from the real purpose of deploying your wireless sensor networks? Fear not, BSNOS is here to help. Programming BSN applications normally requires an in depth knowledge of embedded systems, low level programming, wireless transmission, low power techniques, amongst other skills.  Not all researchers in BSN have these skills and most domain scientists, such as sport scientists, who have no (or minimal) knowledge of programming, find it difficult to develop their own BSN applications.  

 At the recent annual conference on Body Sensor Networks (BSN)the Pervasive Sensing team of the Hamlyn Centre released a beta release of the platform for the research community. The platform consists of the operating system that runs on BSN nodes and an IDE to facilitate coding and application download. Due to the popularity of Java, the team have decided to expose a Java programming environment which encapsulates an easy to use API (Application Programming Interface) to minimise the learning curve to begin developing BSN applications.

 In order to provide a Java programming environment, the team conducted an evaluation of different techniques that would enable a Java runtime including Interpreters, Java-to-C compilers, Java-to-Native Code compilers and run-time compilers.  BSNOS is built on a run-time compiler in order to provide an efficient execution platform along with a platform independent application encoding.

 The platform currently targets novice programmers and is being extended to provide intuitive graphical user interfaces for configuring BSN nodes which should enable domain scientists to easily program BSN nodes to their requirements. The BSN development kit is available from Sensixa (link www.sensixa.com), a spin-off company from Imperial College to provide dedicated hardware support to the BSN community.

 The first introductory tutorial was conducted at the BSN 2011 conference held at UT Dallas and the next tutorial will take place at SENSORCOMM 2011 in Nice, France.