Declarative tracepoints: a programmable and application independent debugging system for wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

Effective debugging usually involves watching program state to diagnose bugs. When debugging sensor network applications, this approach is often time-consuming and errorprone, not only because of the lack of visibility into system state, but also because of the difficulty to watch the right variables at the right time. In this paper, we present declarative tracepoints, a debugging system that allows the user to insert a group of action-associated checkpoints, or tracepoints, to applications being debugged at runtime. Tracepoints do not require modifying application source code. Instead, they are written in a declarative, SQL-like language called TraceSQL independently. By triggering the associated actions when these checkpoints are reached, this system automates the debugging process by removing the human from the loop. We show that declarative tracepoints are able to express the core functionality of a range of previously isolated debugging techniques, such as EnviroLog, NodeMD, Sympathy, and StackGuard. We describe the design and implementation of the declarative tracepoints system, evaluate its overhead in terms of CPU slowdown, illustrate its expressiveness through the aforementioned debugging techniques, and finally demonstrate that it can be used to detect real bugs using case studies of three bugs based on the development of the LiteOS operating system.

REFERENCES

• 1: Atmel Corporation. Mature AVR JTAG ICE. http://www. atmel. com/dyn/products/tools-card. asp?tool-id=2737.
• 2: D. Gay. Design of matchbox, The simple filing system for motes. Available at http://www.tinyos.net/tinyos-1.x/doc/matchbox-design.pdf.
• 3: The DTrace Homepage on Sun Microsystems. Website: http://www. sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace.
• 4: Shah Bhatti , James Carlson , Hui Dai , Jing Deng , Jeff Rose , Anmol Sheth , Brian Shucker , Charles Gruenwald , Adam Torgerson , Richard Han, MANTIS OS: an embedded multithreaded operating system for wireless micro sensor platforms, Mobile Networks and Applications, v.10 n.4, p.563-579, August 2005 [doi>10.1145/1160162.1160178]
• 5: Qing Cao , Tarek Abdelzaher, Scalable logical coordinates framework for routing in wireless sensor networks, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), v.2 n.4, p.557-593, November 2006 [doi>10.1145/1218556.1218561]
• 6: Qing Cao , Tarek Abdelzaher , John Stankovic , Tian He, The LiteOS Operating System: Towards Unix-Like Abstractions for Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks, p.233-244, April 22-24, 2008 [doi>10.1109/IPSN.2008.54]
• 7: Nathan Cooprider , Will Archer , Eric Eide , David Gay , John Regehr, Efficient memory safety for TinyOS, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 06-09, 2007, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.1145/1322263.1322283]
• 8: Crispin Cowan , Calton Pu , Dave Maier , Heather Hintony , Jonathan Walpole , Peat Bakke , Steve Beattie , Aaron Grier , Perry Wagle , Qian Zhang, StackGuard: automatic adaptive detection and prevention of buffer-overflow attacks, Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Security Symposium, p.5-5, January 26-29, 1998, San Antonio, Texas
• 9: A. Dunkels, B. Gronvall, and T. Voigt. Contiki -- A lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors. In Emnets-I, 2004.
• 10: Lewis Girod , Jeremy Elson , Alberto Cerpa , Thanos Stathopoulos , Nithya Ramanathan , Deborah Estrin, EmStar: a software environment for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.24-24, June 27-July 02, 2004, Boston, MA
• 11: Jason Hill , Robert Szewczyk , Alec Woo , Seth Hollar , David Culler , Kristofer Pister, System architecture directions for networked sensors, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.93-104, November 2000, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 12: Jonathan W. Hui , David Culler, The dynamic behavior of a data dissemination protocol for network programming at scale, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 03-05, 2004, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1031495.1031506]
• 13: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Mendhekar, C. Maeda, C. V. Lopes, J.-M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In European Confernece on Object-Oriented Porgramming, volume 1241 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 220--242, 1997.
• 14: Veljko Krunic , Eric Trumpler , Richard Han, NodeMD: diagnosing node-level faults in remote wireless sensor systems, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, June 11-13, 2007, San Juan, Puerto Rico [doi>10.1145/1247660.1247669]
• 15: Philip Levis , David Culler, Maté: a tiny virtual machine for sensor networks, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, October 05-09, 2002, San Jose, California
• 16: Philip Levis , Nelson Lee , Matt Welsh , David Culler, TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958506]
• 17: L. Luo, T. He, G. Zhou, L. Gu, T. F. Abdelzaher, and J. A. Stankovic. Achieving repeatability of asynchronous events in wireless sensor networks with EnviroLog. In IEEE INFOCOM, 2006.
• 18: Gaurav Mathur , Peter Desnoyers , Deepak Ganesan , Prashant Shenoy, Capsule: an energy-optimized object storage system for memory-constrained sensor devices, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182827]
• 19: William P. McCartney , Nigamanth Sridhar, Abstractions for safe concurrent programming in networked embedded systems, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182825]
• 20: Nithya Ramanathan , Kevin Chang , Rahul Kapur , Lewis Girod , Eddie Kohler , Deborah Estrin, Sympathy for the sensor network debugger, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098946]
• 21: Ben L. Titzer , Daniel K. Lee , Jens Palsberg, Avrora: scalable sensor network simulation with precise timing, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks, April 24-27, 2005, Los Angeles, California
• 22: G. Tolle and D. Culler. Design of an application-cooperative management system for wireless sensor networks. In Proceeedings of EWSN, 2005.
• 23: Megan Wachs , Jung Il Choi , Jung Woo Lee , Kannan Srinivasan , Zhe Chen , Mayank Jain , Philip Levis, Visibility: a new metric for protocol design, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 06-09, 2007, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.1145/1322263.1322271]
• 24: Jing Yang , Mary Lou Soffa , Leo Selavo , Kamin Whitehouse, Clairvoyant: a comprehensive source-level debugger for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 06-09, 2007, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.1145/1322263.1322282]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Debugging aids

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Tracing

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
declarative tracepoints, embedded debugging, wireless sensor networks