uFlow: Dynamic Software Updating in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure. Due to the maintenance reason, we may update the software to fix bugs. Because there are more and more sensor nodes using in the vehicle, smart environment, Software updating for wireless sensor networks has become an important issue. In previous related works, Update the node usually is required to reboot. However, reboot the nodes is costly since the previous runtime status may be lost. To recover the runtime status for routing, it will take time and bandwidth to synchronize with other nodes. We present uFlow: a programming paradigm and a prototype implementation for wireless sensor networks. uFlow allows application to update the nodes without rebooting. So we can avoid to lost precious runtime status.