Power management is an important problem in battery powered sensor networks as the sensors are required to operate for a long
time (usually, several weeks to several months). One of the challenges in developing power management protocols for sensor
networks is prototyping. Specifically, existing programming platforms for sensor networks (e.g., nesC/TinyOS) use an event-driven
programming model and, hence, require the designers to be responsible for stack management, buffer management, flow control,
etc. Therefore, the designers simplify prototyping their solutions either by implementing their own discrete event simulators
or by modeling them in specialized simulators. To enable the designers to prototype power management protocols in target platform
(e.g., nesC/TinyOS), in this paper, we use ProSe, a programming tool for sensor networks. ProSe enables the designers to specify their programs in simple abstract models
while hiding low-level challenges of sensor networks and programming-level challenges. As a case study, in this paper, we
specify a power management protocol with ProSe, automatically generate the corresponding nesC/TinyOS code, and evaluate its
performance. Based on the performance results, we expect that ProSe enables the designers to rapidly prototype, quickly deploy,
and easily evaluate their protocols.
This work was partially sponsored by NSF CAREER CCR-0092724, DARPA Grant OSURS01-C-1901, ONR Grant N00014-01-1-0744, NSF Equipment
Grant EIA-0130724, and a grant from Michigan State University.