Purdue ECE graduate students Mathew Tancreti and Mohammad Sajjad Hossain and ECE faculty members Saurabh Bagchi and Vijay Raghunathan won the best paper award at the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) for their paper titled "AVEKSHA: A Hardware-Software Approach for Non-Intrusive Tracing and Profiling of Wireless Embedded Systems." Mathew Tancreti is advised by Prof. Saurabh Bagchi and Mohammad Sajjad Hossain is advised by Prof. Vijay Raghunathan.

ACM SenSys is a highly selective, single-track forum for the presentation of research results on systems issues in the area of embedded, networked sensors and is considered the flagship conference in the area of wireless sensor networks. SenSys 2011 was held at Seattle, WA from November 1-4 and accepted 24 papers out of 126 submissions.

The paper presents a hardware-software technique for debugging code running on an embedded wireless node without causing any interference with the application running on it. The solution uses a custom-built hardware board (called the debug board) that interfaces with the main processor on the embedded wireless node through the JTAG port. The debug board has software that is very efficient in reading off events of interest as they execute on the main application processor, such as, when it takes an interrupt, when it enters and exits from a function, and when it performs a read on a peripheral. The solution also includes an ability to account for energy usage by each function, and at even finer levels of granularity in the code. Previous software-only solutions for this problem would interfere with the timing of the application thus either suppressing some bugs observed in the field, or exposing some bugs that would not be seen in practice. Previous hardware-only solutions have to be customized for each individual processor and do not exist for the low-end embedded processors widely used today (such as Texas Instruments’ MSP class of microprocessors); when they do exist, they have an exorbitantly high cost (e.g., $15,000 for one commercial offering), which would render them unusable for most embedded applications.  

At SenSys, the team also gave a demonstration of Aveksha showing real-time profiling of various applications running on the Texas Instruments’ MSP430 platform, a popular platform for embedded wireless networks.

Further details about the project can be found at the following URL:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ESL/projects/aveksha/

The paper and the presentation can be found at the following URLs:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/dcsl/publications/papers/2011/aveksha-sensys2011.pdf
https://engineering.purdue.edu/dcsl/presentations/2011/aveksha-sensys2011.pdf

Figure 1. Matt looking happy now that he sees his demo working. He is holding in his hand the embedded wireless node, coupled with the debug board. In the background, you see a part of the demo room that was the site of frenetic activity on day 2 of Sensys, with 33 demos being presented.