Odysseus

Overview

Sensor networks are key area of research for the Systems Research Group. Sensor networks are collections of low power, small compute nodes that have sensing capabilities and that can communicate data from the sensors to other nodes. Research is applying these sensor networks to a wide range of problems in personal health monitoring to city management. However, the design of code for sensor nodes and the configuration of sets of the the nodes is currently poorly supported by software engineering tools.

This project will develop a plug-in for a development environment that allows programmers to build applications for individual sensor nodes and to configure networks of nodes. The project will be staged to deliver key support for distinct components of the development process to ensure the inern can make clear progress.

The project will use sensor nodes from the Tyndall Institute and the Eclipse programming environment.

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse is rapidly becoming the de facto programming and development environment.

Extensions to Eclipse are made through plug-ins. These plug-ins allow the development environment to be customised to a particular progarmmign language or application domain.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

The Systems Research Group is developing a large sensor test bed for pervasive computing. As part of this development the group is collaborating with the Tyndall institute and will be deploying a set of sensor nodes from Tyndall. These nodes come with inteface and setup code but do not have a development environment. If successful, this project will provide a key tool for the research group and for the Tyndall institute.

Supervisors:

Professor Paddy Nixon, Dr Simon Dobson (AIC, UCD)

Keywords:

Software Engineering, Pervasive Computing, Eclispe, Integrated Development Environments, Adaptive Systems.