CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Autonomous Failure Detection and Recovery in Networked Embedded Systems

联网嵌入式系统的开发人员经常发现很难诊断错误。一个关键的观察结果是，在这样的系统中，利用有关物理世界中事件的领域知识来检测故障可能是有益的。例如，在传感器网络部署中，知道无线电传输的接收信号强度通常会随着距离而减小，应用开发者可以实施运行时检查以基于它们到源的相对距离和它们接收信号强度的排序来检测故障节点。基于这种直觉，该项目通过(I)提出、开发和评估使用物理事件来检测软件错误的方法，(Ii)开发软件库和API以便于应用开发者容易地访问物理事件约束，来解决开发正确、有弹性和可靠的联网嵌入式系统的挑战，以及(Iii)使用真实世界应用程序来评估软件库的有效性。该框架可以显著降低复杂网络嵌入式系统的调试和维护成本，提高系统的可靠性。除了这种直接的社会和经济利益，这项工作还产生了更广泛的影响，包括：(I)通过动手调试课程改进课程；(Ii)通过大学前研究学者计划提高高中高年级学生对技术的兴趣；(Iii)支持有才华的女性和代表性不足的少数族裔博士生成功完成博士学习；(Iv)通过高质量的出版物、备受瞩目的教程和开源网站传播研究成果。

Developers of networked embedded systems often find it difficult to diagnose bugs. A key observation is that in such systems, it can be beneficial to exploit domain knowledge about events in the physical world to detect failures. For example, in a sensor network deployment, knowing that the received signal strength of a radio transmission will normally decrease over distance, the application developer can enforce runtime checks to detect faulty nodes based on their relative distances to the source and the orderings of their received signal strength.Based on this intuition, this project addresses the challenge of developing correct, resilient, and reliable networked embedded systems by (i) proposing, developing, and evaluating a methodology of using physical events to detect software bugs, (ii) developing software libraries and APIs to facilitate easy access to physical event constraints by application developers, and (iii) evaluating the effectiveness of the software libraries using real-world applications. The completed framework could significantly reduce the debugging and maintenance costs for complicated networked embedded systems, and improve their reliability. Beyond such direct social and economic benefits, the broader impacts of this work include: (i) improving curriculum with hands-on debugging sessions; (ii) raising interest in technology among high school seniors through a Pre-Collegiate Research Scholars Program; (iii) supporting talented female and under-represented minority PhD students to successfully accomplish their doctoral studies; (iv) disseminating research results through high-quality publications, high-profile tutorials, and open-source sites.