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

网络嵌入式系统的开发人员经常发现很难诊断错误。一个关键的观察是，在这样的系统中，利用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的增加而减小，应用程序开发人员可以根据节点到源的相对距离和接收信号强度的顺序强制执行运行时检查，以检测故障节点。基于这种直觉，本项目通过(i)提出、开发和评估使用物理事件检测软件错误的方法，（ii）开发软件库和api，以方便应用程序开发人员轻松访问物理事件约束，以及（iii）评估使用实际应用程序的软件库的有效性，解决了开发正确、有弹性和可靠的网络嵌入式系统的挑战。完成的框架可以显著降低复杂网络化嵌入式系统的调试和维护成本，提高系统的可靠性。除了这些直接的社会和经济效益之外，这项工作的更广泛影响包括：(i)通过动手调试课程改进课程；（ii）通过大学预科研究学者计划提高高中毕业生对技术的兴趣；（三）支持优秀女性和少数民族博士生顺利完成博士学业；（四）通过高质量的出版物、高知名度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.