evaluating a basic approach to sensor network node programming
Sensor networks have the potential to empower domain experts from a wide range of fields. However, presently they are notoriously difficult for these domain experts to program, even though their applications are often conceptually simple. We address this problem by applying the BASIC programming language to sensor networks and evaluating its effectiveness. BASIC has proven highly successful in the past in allowing novices to write useful programs on home computers. Our contributions include a user study evaluating how well novice (no programming experience) and intermediate (some programming experience) users can accomplish simple sensor network tasks in BASIC and in TinyScript (a principally event-driven high-level language for node-oriented programming) and an evaluation of power consumption issues in BASIC. 45--55\% of novice users can complete simple tasks in BASIC, while only 0--17\% can do so in TinyScript. In both languages, users generally are most successful using imperative loop-oriented programming. The use of an interpreter, such as our BASIC implementation, has little impact on the power consumption of applications in which computational demands are low. Further, when in final form, BASIC can be compiled to reduce power consumption even further.
basic sensor networks cyber-physical systems