Embedded Sensing Systems

We research new programming languages, operating systems, and software for embedded devices. Embedded systems are difficult computer platforms for programmers to work with. The need to meet hard real-time deadlines, fit programs into a small amount of memory, be robust to failures, and conserve energy wherever possible. Furthermore, ultra-low power systems have very different hardware, lacking abstractions such as virtualization and cache hierarchies. Our work focuses on software abstractions that allow you to build large, complex applications. Tock is a secure embexded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on low-memory and low-power microcontrollers. It departs from decades of operating systems by being written in a modern, type-safe language: Rust. Tock isolates software faults, provides memory protection, and efficiently manages memory for dynamic application workloads written in any language. It achieves this while retaining the dependability requirements of long-running applications Low-power wireless communication is a common challenge in embedded applications: an ultra-efficient sensing device that can't report its data is useless. We've therefore developed new wireless protocols, simulators, and programming abstractions to make networking much easier. We've established that packet losses in wireless networks have complex correlations over space and time. Protocols which consider these complications are much more reliable and higher performance. Our research on the Collection Tree Protocol, CTP, has become the core networking primitive in RPL (RFC6550), the Internet standard for connecting low-power wireless networks to the Internet. Finally, we deploy our protocols and systems to test their effectiveness in practice. In collaboration with epidimeologists, we set out to collect data on all close proximity interactions in a closed network - a U.S. high school. We recruited over 700 people - students, teachers, and staff - and asked them to wear a wireless device for a day. At the end of the school day, we collected enough data to reconstruct the real-life social network of the entire school. We later used this data to study the spread of infectious diseases such as the flu. The data revealed a high-density network with typical small-world properties and a relatively homogeneous distribution of both interaction time and interaction partners among subjects. Analysis of targeted immunization strategies suggested that contact network data are required to design strategies that are significantly more effective than random immunization. Immunization strategies based on contact network data were most effective at high vaccination coverage.

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Publications

Software defined grid energy storage. Sonia Martin, Nicholas Mosier, Obi Nnorom, Yancheng Ou, Liana Patel, Oskar Triebe, Gustavo Cezar, Philip Levis, Ram Rajagopal. In BuildSys '22: Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation, 2022.			WWW	Paper
Tighten Rust’s Belt: Shrinking Embedded Rust Binaries. Hudson Ayers, Evan Laufer, Paul Mure, Jaehyeon Park, Eduardo Rodelo, Thea Rossman, Andrey Pronin, Philip Levis, Johnathan Van Why. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2022), 2022.			WWW	Paper
Tiered Trust for Useful Embedded Systems Security. Hudson Ayers, Prabal Dutta, Philip Levis, Amit Levy, Pat Pannuto, Johnathan Van Why, Jean-Luc Watson. In Proceedings of the 15th European Workshop on Systems Security (EuroSec), 2022.			WWW	Paper
Receiving Colliding LoRa Packets with Hard Information Iterative Decoding. Raejoon Jung and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference and Exhibition on Global Telecommunications (GLOBECOM), 2021.			WWW
Power Clocks: Dynamic Multi-Clock Management for Embedded Systems. Holly Chiang, Hudson Ayers, Daniel B. Giffin, Amit Levy and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN 2021), 2021.			WWW
Creating Hardware Component Knowledge Bases with Training Data Generation and Multi-task Learning. Luke Hsiao, Sen Wu, Nicholas Chiang, Christopher Ré, and Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2020.	Data		WWW	Paper
Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols. Hudson Ayers, Paul Crews, Hubert Teo, Conor McAvity, Amit Levy, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2020), 2020.			WWW	Paper
Falcon — A Flexible Architecture For Accelerating Cryptography. Kevin Kiningham, Philip Levis, Mark Anderson, Dan Boneh, Mark Horowitz, and Maurice Shih . In Proceedings of the The 16th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS '19), 2019.			WWW	Paper
Challenge: Unlicensed LPWANs Are Not Yet the Path to Ubiquitous Connectivity. Branden Ghena, Joshua Adkins, Longfei Shangguan, Kyle Jamieson, Philip Levis, and Prabal Dutta. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '19), 2019.			WWW	Paper
Automating the Generation of Hardware Component Knowledge Bases. Luke Hsiao, Sen Wu, Nicholas Chiang, Christopher Ré, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES ’19), 2019.	Data	Slides	WWW	Paper
Smart Contracts for Machine-to-Machine Communication: Possibilities and Limitations. Yuichi Hanada, Luke Hsiao, Philip Levis. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things and Intelligence System (IOTAIS), 2018.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Tethys: Collecting Sensor Data Without Infrastructure or Trust. Holly Chiang, James Hong, Kevin Kiningham, Laurynas Riliskis, Philip Levis, and Mark Horowitz. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), 2018.			WWW	Paper
Don’t Talk Unless I Say So! Securing the Internet of Things With Default-Off Networking. James Hong, Amit Levy, Laurynas Riliskis, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), 2018.			WWW	Paper
Multiprogramming a 64 kB Computer Safely and Efficiently. Amit Levy and Bradford Campbell and Branden Ghena and Daniel Giffin and Pat Pannuto and Prabal Dutta and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2017), 2017.	Data		WWW	Paper
The Case for Writing a Kernel in Rust. Amit Levy, Bradford Campbell, Branden Ghena, Pat Pannuto, Prabal Dutta, Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Eighth ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2017), 2017.			WWW	Paper
Trust but Verify: Auditing Secure Internet of Things Devices. Judson Wilson, Riad S. Wahby, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Dan Boneh, Philip Levis and Keith Winstein. In Proceedings of the The 15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2017), 2017.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Robust, low-cost, auditable random number generation for embedded system security. Ben Lampert, Riad S. Wahby, Shane Leonard and Philip Levis. In The 14th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2016.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Beetle: Flexible Communication for Bluetooth Low Energy. Amit Levy, James Hong, Laurynas Riliskis, Philip Levis, and Keith Winstein. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), 2016.		Slides	WWW	Paper
CESEL: Securing a Mote for 20 Years. Kevin Kiningham, Mark Horowitz, Philip Levis, and Dan Boneh. In Proceedings of the 13th European conference on Wireless sensor networks (EWSN 2016), 2016.			WWW	Paper
Ravel: Programming IoT Applications as Distributed Models, Views, and Controllers. Laurynas Riliskis, James Hong, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Workshop on Internet of Things towards Applications (IoT-App'15), 2015.			WWW	Paper
Ownership is Theft: Experiences Building an Embedded OS in Rust. Amit Levy, Michael P Andersen, Bradford Campbell, David Culler, Prabal Dutta, Branden Ghena, Philip Levis and Pat Pannuto. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2015), 2015.		Slides	WWW	Paper
System Architecture Support for Green Enterprise Computing. Maria Kazandjieva, Chinmayee Shah, Ewen Cheslack-Postava, Behram Mistree, Philip Levis. In Proceedings 5th International Green Computing Conference (IGCC), 2014.		Slides	WWW	Paper
CTP: An Efficient, Robust, and Reliable Collection Tree Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, Maria Kazandjieva, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), 2013.			WWW	Paper
Long-term modification of cortical synapses improves sensory perception. Robert C Froemke, Ioana Carcea, Alison J Barker, Kexin Yuan, Bryan A Seybold, Ana Raquel O Martins, Natalya Zaika, Hannah Bernstein, Megan Wachs, Philip A Levis, Daniel B Polley, Michael M Merzenich and Christoph E Schreiner. In Nature Neuroscience 16, 79-88, 2013.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Experiences from a Decade of TinyOS Development. Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2012.		Slides	WWW	Paper
RFC 6719 - The Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function. Omprakash Gnawali and Philip Levis. In Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 6719, 2012.			WWW	Paper
Energy Management in Mobile Devices with the Cinder Operating System. Arjun Roy, Stephen Rumble, Ryan Stutsman, Philip Levis, David Mazieres, and Nickolai Zeldovich. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2011), 2011.			WWW	Paper
RFC 6206: The Trickle Algorithm. Philip Levis and Thomas Clausen and Jonathan Hui and Omprakash Gnawali and JeongGil Ko. In Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 6206, 2011.			WWW	Paper
A high-resolution human contact network for infectious disease transmission. Marcel Salathe, Maria Kazandjieva, Jung Woo Lee, Philip Levis, Marcus W. Feldman and James H. Jones. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2010.	Data		WWW	Paper
A Case for Evaluating Sensor Network Protocols Concurrently. Omprakash Gnawali, Leonidas Guibas, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH), 2010.			WWW	Paper
The k-factor: Inferring Protocol Performance Using Inter-Link Reception Correlation. Kannan Srinivasan, Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Tahir Azim, Edward S Kim, Philip Levis and Bhaskar Krishnamachari. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2010), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Whirlpool Routing for Mobility. Jung Woo Lee, Branislav Kusy, Tahir Azim, Philip Levis, and Basem Shihada. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc), 2010.			WWW	Paper
Experiences in Measuring a Human Contact Network for Epidemiology Research. Maria Kazandjieva, Jung Woo Lee, Marcel Salathe, Marcus W. Feldman, James H. Jones, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors (HotEmNets), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Physically-Based Models of Low-Power Wireless Links using Signal Power Simulation. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (COMNET), 2010.			WWW	Paper
An Empirical Study of Low Power Wireless. Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2010.			WWW	Paper
TOSThreads: Thread-Safe and Non-Invasive Preemption in TinyOS. Kevin Klues, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Jeongyeup Paek, Razvan Musaloiu-E., Philip Levis, Andreas Terzis, and Ramesh Govindan. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The Case for a Network Protocol Isolation Layer. Jung Il Choi, Maria Kazandjieva, Mayank Jain, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.			WWW	Paper
Collection Tree Protocol. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.	Data		WWW	Paper
Surviving Sensor Network Software Faults. Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria Kazandjieva, Philip Levis, and John Regehr. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Starburst SSD: An Efficient Protocol for Selective Dissemination. Tahir Azim, Philip Levis and Qasim Mansoor. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2009.			WWW	Paper
Burstiness and scaling in the structure of low-power wireless links. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Quanto: Tracking Energy in Networked Embedded Systems. Rodrigo Fonseca, Prabal Dutta, Philip Levis, and Ion Stoica. In Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2008.			WWW	Paper
The Emergence of a Networking Primitive in Wireless Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, Eric Brewer, David Culler, David Gay, Samuel Madden, Neil Patel, Joe Polastre, Scott Shenker, Robert Szewczyk, and Alec Woo. In Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7, 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Data Discovery and Dissemination with DIP. Kaisen Lin and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2008.			WWW	Paper
Four-Bit Wireless Link Estimation. Rodrigo Fonseca, Omprakash Gnawali, Kyle Jamieson, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets VI), 2007.			WWW	Paper
Visibility: A New Metric for Protocol Design. Megan Wachs, Jung Il Choi, Jung Woo Lee, Kannan Srinivasan, Zhe Chen, Mayank Jain and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Integrating Concurrency Control and Energy Management in Device Drivers. Kevin Klues, Vlado Handziski, Chenyang Lu, Adam Wolisz, David Culler, David Gay, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Improving Wireless Simulation Through Noise Modeling. HyungJune Lee, Alberto Cerpa, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Opening the Sensornet Black Box. Jung Il Choi, Jung Woo Lee, Megan Wachs, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Wireless Sensornet Architecture (WWSNA), 2007.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Some Implications of Low-Power Wireless to IP Routing. Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets V), 2006.		Slides	WWW	Paper
RSSI Is Under-Appreciated. Kannan Srinivasan and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets), 2006.		Slides	WWW	Paper
A Unifying Link Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks. Joseph Polastre, Jonathan Hui, Philip Levis, Jerry Zhao, David Culler, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica. In Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2005.			WWW	Paper
Towards a Sensor Network Architecture: Lowering the Waistline. David Culler, Prabal Dutta, Cheng Tien Eee, Rodrigo Fonseca, Jonathan Hui, Philip Levis, Joseph Polastre, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Gilman Tolle, and Jerry Zhao. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS X), 2005.			WWW	Paper
Software Design Patterns for TinyOS. David Gay, Philip Levis, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED 2005 Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES), 2005.			WWW	Paper
Active Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, David Gay, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the Second USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2005.			WWW	Paper
The Emergence of Networking Abstractions and Techniques in TinyOS. Philip Levis, Sam Madden, David Gay, Joe Polastre, Robert Szewczyk, Alec Woo, Eric Brewer, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the First USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2004.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, Neil Patel, David Culler, and Scott Shenker. In Proceedings of the First USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2004.		Slides	WWW	Paper
TOSSIM: Accurate and Scalable Simulation of Entire TinyOS Applications. Philip Levis, Nelson Lee, Matt Welsh, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2003.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Network Embedded Systems. David Gay, Philip Levis, Robert von Behren, Matt Welsh, Eric Brewer, and David Culler. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2003.			WWW	Paper
Mate: A Tiny Virtual Machine for Sensor Networks. Philip Levis and David Culler. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS X), 2002.		Slides	WWW	Paper

Funding

This work was supported by generous gifts from Intel Research, DoCoMo Capital, Foundation Capital, the National Science Foundation under grants #0615308 and #0846014, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Microsoft Research, scholarships from the Samsung Scholarship Foundation and a Stanford Terman Fellowship. Our scientific work was supported a National Science Foundation awards BCS-0947132, DE-AR-0000018, grants #0615308 and #0846014, a Branco Weiss fellowship, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Award 1K01HD051494, and National Institutes of Health Grant GM28016.

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