INRIA Postdoc Position

TinySCA:
A Uniform Component Model for Hybrid Sensor Networks



Host

ADAM Research Group
INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne
40, avenue Halley - Bat. A, Park Plaza
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq - FRANCE

Context

INRIA, the national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). Throughout its 8 research centers located in 7 major regions (Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Île-de-France, Nord Pas-de-Calais, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Rhône-Alpes), the Institute has a workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its partner organizations. INRIA has an annual budget of 162 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products. INRIA develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are financed in particular by INRIA Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA that supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign students as well as developing strong exchanges between research scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth: Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East. The INRIA Lille Nord Europe research center is conveniently located at less than 1 hour from Paris (by TGV), 38 minutes from Brussels and 1h20' from London (by Eurostar).

ADAM is a project-team of the INRIA Lille Nord Europe research center. Members of the ADAM project-team are also part of the LIFL (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille), which is a joint unit between CNRS and the University of Lille 1. The objective of the ADAM (Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware) project-team is to provide a set of concepts, paradigms, approaches, frameworks, and tools based on advanced software engineering techniques such as CBSE (Component-Based Software Engineering), AOSD (Aspect-Oriented Software Development) or CAC (Context-Aware Computing) to build distributed adaptive software systems (applications and middleware) involving in multi-scale environments and to take into account the adaptation all along the software life-cycle. The ADAM project-team proposes solutions to manage the evolution of application requirements in terms of functional and extra-functional properties either at the level of execution platforms or at the design level. The ADAM project-team applies them to component-based and service-oriented computing distributed applications and platforms.


Project

Advances on the wireless sensor technologies, both in the hardware (memory, processor, sensing device) and software (modularized/loadable operating systems, adaptation middleware, numerous protocol stacks) layers have broadened and triggered many new domains of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications: automation system control, smart building, smart grid, adaptive environment monitoring, to list a few. However, the abundance of WSN applications and the heterogeneity of wireless sensor technologies also raise different challenges: i) a cost-effective middleware solution to share resources of sensor nodes between WSN applications; ii) integration of WSNs middleware services to the enterprise networks, and the Internet, to consider WSN applications as parts of the enterprise systems; iii) common application interfaces for heterogeneous WSNs applications through the standardization; iv) intelligent reasoning for the automatic triggers of adaptation and reconfiguration in WSN applications; and v) reliable and secure control and management of WSNs applications.

For the time being, most of the relevant approaches [1,2,3] have focused on the adoption of a service-oriented application style or component-based software engineering [4,5,6,7,8], but none of them satisfy all these requirements to leverage on the development of hybrid sensor networks. Therefore, the objective of this postdoc position is to design and develop TinySCA, a uniform component model for Service-oriented Sensor Networks. To avoid the definition of yet another component model, TinySCA component is largely inspired by the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard, which was initially designed for the integration of large-scale systems-of-systems [9]. Nevertheless, one of the interesting property of the SCA specification is that it has been defined as a modular component model, therefore opening for the definition of domain-specific extensions. We therefore believe that the SCA standard can be extended to support the specificities of sensor networks (programming languages, communication protocols, data encoding). By adopting a uniform component model, TinySCA will provide a solution for bridging sensor networks and legacy IT infrastructures. In particular, this challenge will be technically achieved by ensuring the interoperability of TinySCA with the FraSCAti platform [10] currently developed by the ADAM research group. Ultimately, the target features of TinySCA are: the support for multiple deployment environments, the support for multiple programming paradigms, the support and the abstraction of for various communication protocols.

This research will be achieved in the context of the SeaS associate team in collaboration with the University of Oslo, which is working on a similar component model named Remora. The recruited postdoc will therefore actively interact with the members of the Network and Distributed systems research group.


Research Agenda

  1. Study the SCA specifications and the SotA related WSN component models,
  2. Identify the required extensions to SCA for supporting hybrid sensor networks,
  3. Formalize the definition of the TinySCA component model,
  4. Develop the tool-chain generating the platform-specific sensor code,
  5. Integrate TinySCA with the FraSCAti platform,
  6. Publish the results in the best international conferences and journals.

Expected Skills

Candidates should have an excellent research record, with previous experience in at least three of the following domains:


Requirements

Applicant should have held a doctorate or Ph.D. for less than one year or you are about to obtain one and you would like to carry out a fulfilling research activity in the field of ICST (information and communication science and technology) or in a related field.

Please provide a CV, list of publications, a research statement (1 to 4 pages), and at least two references (whom we will contact ourselves for a recommendation).


Salary

2 620 € gross/month (~2 138 € Net)

Contact & Application

For more information, please contact Romain Rouvoy (ADAM @ INRIA Lille – Nord Europe).
Thank you for applying directly on the institute's website, by clicking on the following link.

References

  1. T. Luckenbach, P. Gober, S. Arbanowski, A. Kotsopoulos, and K. Kim. TinyREST: A Protocol for Integrating Sensor Networks into the Internet. In Proceedings of Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks (REALWSN'05). June 2005.
  2. E. Avilés-López and A. García-Macías. TinySOA: a service-oriented architecture for wireless sensor networks. Springer Journal on Service Oriented Computing and Applications 3:2. June 2009.
  3. A. Kamilaris. A Lightweight Resource-Oriented Application Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks. Master’s Thesis. Department of Computer Science - ETH Zürich. April 2009.
  4. Gay, P. Levis, R. von Behren, M. Welsh, E. Brewer, D. Culler. The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Networked Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2003.
  5. P. Costa, G. Coulson, C. Mascolo, L. Mottola, G. Picco, and S. Zachariadis. Reconfigurable Component-based Middleware for Networked Embedded Systems. International Journal of Wireless Information Networks 12:2. June 2007.
  6. J.-P. Fassino, J.-B. Stefani, J. Lawall, and G. Muller. THINK: A Software Framework for Component-based Operating System Kernels. In Proceedings of Usenix Annual Technical Conference, June 2002.
  7. D. Hughes, K. Thoelen, W. Horré, N. Matthys, J. Del Cid, S. Michiels, C. Huygens, and W. Joosen. LooCI: a loosely-coupled component infrastructure for networked embedded systems. Technical Report CW 564, K.U.Leuven. September 2009.
  8. B. Porter, and G. Coulson. Lorien: a Pure Dynamic Component-Based Operating System for Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of MidSens'09, workshop associated with IFIP/ACM/USENIX Middleware 09.
  9. OSOA. Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications. http://osoa.org/display/Main/Service+Component+Architecture+Home
  10. L. Seinturier, P. Merle, D. Fournier, N. Dolet, V. Schiavoni, and J.-B. Stefani. Reconfigurable SCA Applications with the FraSCAti Platform. In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Service Computing (SCC'09), pages 268-275, September 2009. http://frascati.ow2.org