EmStar: Software for Wireless Sensor Networks

by The EmStar Team
2005-07-28

Site and Mailing List Search:

These pages provide information on how to use and extend the EmStar system. EmStar is a software system for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks involving Linux-based platforms. As the wireless sensor network community has attempted to deploy more complex designs---large-scale, long-lived systems that need self-organization and adaptivity---a number of difficult software design issues have arisen. Advances in software design have not kept pace with the capabilities of hardware. This is because designing for an adaptive, efficient, and useful sensor network has turned out to be surprisingly complex and difficult. EmStar is a Linux-based software framework, whose goal is to dramatically reduce this complexity, enabling work to be shared and reused, and simplifying and speeding the design of new sensor network applications.

Tutorial and Reference

If you're new to EmStar, and want to get started quickly, start with:

People more familiar with EmStar are probably looking for:

Mailing Lists and Community Involvement

We maintain two mailing lists for EmStar discussions, emstar-users and emstar-design. Please note that these lists only accept postings from members, so be sure to join the list before sending traffic, otherwise your message may be discarded.

Questions about how to use EmStar system in similar ways to current uses should be directed to emstar-users (Newbie questions welcome!!). The archives or the FAQ may already have the answers to some of your questions.

Discussion about the large-scale design of EmStar, new features and directions takes place on the emstar-design list and archives. The EmStar CVS does not allow commits outside of the core developers. However, we are happy to negotiate access and consider patches for bug fixes, new tools, and new features.

You may also write to specific maintainers personally, but be advised that messages may be forwarded and or responses may be cc'd to the appropriate list if they would be of general interest, or better answered by the list community.

Downloads

Please visit our EmStar Downloads page for current and historical releases, CVS access, and cross-compiler packages for supported platforms.

Porting

For information and tips on porting EmStar to new platforms, please see our Porting Page.

Academic Publications

We have published several papers and tech reports about EmStar and its uses. The papers specifically about EmStar are listed below. Please see our downloads page for more publications, Powerpoint decks, etc.

L. Girod, T. Stathopoulos, N. Ramanathan, J. Elson, D. Estrin, E. Osterweil, and T. Schoellhammer, "A System for Simulation, Emulation, and Deployment of Heterogeneous Sensor Networks", to appear in Proc. of SenSys 2004. PDF PS Also published as CENS Technical Report #37, April 2004. TR-PDF

L. Girod, J. Elson, A. Cerpa, T. Stathopoulos, N. Ramanathan, D. Estrin, "EmStar: a Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks", in the Proceedings of USENIX General Track 2004. PDF, PS, Also published as CENS Technical Report #34 TR-PDF,

J. Elson, S. Bien, N. Busek, V. Bychkovskiy, A. Cerpa, D. Ganesan, L. Girod, B. Greenstein, T. Schoellhammer, T. Stathopoulos, and D. Estrin, "EmStar: An Environment for Developing Wireless Embedded Systems Software", CENS Technical Report 0009, March 24, 2003. PDF

(BibTeX available)

Courses that use EmStar

Acknowledgements

EmStar is the work of many contributors, at CENS, I-LENSE, and elsewhere.

We would also like to thank the various open source projects upon which we depend, including

Funding for EmStar development has been provided by the following contributors:

If you're looking for something from the original site...