Porting nesC Application to Contiki

Abstract

There are many operating systems that have been designed to work on resource constrained environments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). TinyOS is one of the initial operating systems of this kind which has been used for years. Therefore, there are numerous WSN applications written in nesC programming language for TinyOS. Contiki is another operating system which is getting very popular in WSN community. Contiki application programs are written in C programming language. However, when developing applications for Contiki, there are limitations imposed by Contiki programming model. Therefore, the use of C programming language for developing Contiki applications is different from conventional ANSI C programming. Since, there are number of applications developed for TinyOS, Contiki users have a requirement of converting these applications in such a way that they can be used in Contiki operating system. Therefore, automating the conversion of nesC programs to C programs for Contiki is vital to save the overhead of manual transition which may not be very efficient. In this research, we design and implement an application program translator which converts a given nesC program to a C program. The resulting C program can be directly compiled with Contiki and executed in Contiki environment. This translator maps the event driven programming model of TinyOS to protothread based programming model of Contiki. There has been no research done on converting nesC applications to suit Contiki. We have studied the existing programming language translators to come up with an efficient design for this translator nesC to C translator.