Specifying and Enforcing Resource Utilization Constraints

Embedded networked systems are increasingly complex, requiring development effort that spans a team of designers and implementers. Resource utilization budgets must be carefully specified and enforced to ensure the expected behavior of a composite system. In this paper, we present early results of a project aimed at specifying and enforcing time, space, and power utilization constraints. Our approach consists of programming language extensions that enable these constraints to be made manifest within an implementation, and analysis tools that detect violations. We begin by describing an initial implementation for nesC focused on space utilization, and provide an overview of our ongoing plans. The goal is to elicit early feedback from the target user community.