Over the Air Programming on Imote2-Based Sensor Networks

Some of the main challenges that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) face are reliability, flexibility and security. When WSNs deployed in remote locations need to be reprogrammed, environmental conditions often make it impossible to physically retrieve them. Over the Air Programming (OAP) plays an important role in achieving this task. Several platform dependent protocols have been developed for OAP including Deluge [4] and MOAP [3]. Due to the restrictions of these platform-dependent protocols, any modification to the hardware requires modifications to the underlying protocol. For example, using OAP for Imote2 sensors requires porting Deluge from an existing hardware. This paper reports the many challenges we faced in making OAP possible on an Imote2 sensor network platform, including changes and upgrades to: file system management, java toolbase and GUI implementation, reboot mechanism, and bootloader. The performance of our OAP on the Imote2 platform is evaluated using a real sensor network.