MUNICH, Germany — IBM regards wireless sensor networks as a fast-growing technology segment with a very large application spectrum. However, writing software for such networks is difficult, in particular if they embrace heterogeneous hardware platforms. With a development platform the company now hopes to address this issue.

At the opportunity of a press meeting, scientists of IBM's Zurich research center offered insights into the 'Mote Runner' runtime and development platform for heterogeneous wireless networks.

Basically, the runtime environment creates a virtual machine which shields applications from hardware heterogeneity. Nevertheless, it can run even on sensor nodes (motes) with rather limited resources such as 8-bit processors with 8 kByte of RAM and 128 kByte of Flash memory, claimed researcher Thorsten Kramp.

The platform supports software development in C# and Java, albeit it only supports a subset with limited functionality — a concession to the limited hardware resources of some low-end motes the researchers intend to include into the spectrum of supported devices. For instance, it supports no threads. Nevertheless, the software environment can be configured dynamically and be reconfigured in the field. And the virtual machine makes sure applications can be moved to motes with different hardware.

The development team hitherto worked in stealth mode. But the platform will be available "in the near future", Kramp asserted.

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