Poster: Towards robust reprogrammability for wireless sensors

Embedded systems that are wirelessly reprogrammed can be rendered useless by certain programming errors, excessive power consumption, or misconfigurations in the hardware. These types of situations can leave a device in a state that compromises its programmability, often rendering the device useless. Existing attempts to address the problem of robust wireless reprogramming have all been software-based solutions, that are vulnerable to certain errors, such as memory corruption, can corrupt the recovery programs. We propose a hardware-based solution to wireless reprogramming, physically separating the programmer and target device. This separation limits the propagation of errors, and ensures the device will always be recoverable. In this poster we will present the design and an early prototype of our approach - an ultra-low-power, low-cost hardware solution to ensure recovery from fatal errors and reprogrammability in wireless systems. This poster discusses the current system design, initial results, and system analysis from our current prototype. We also present future and ongoing directions, as well as key research questions. This work was funded by National Science Foundation grants CNS-1314342 and CNS-1453607. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.