WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND MOBILE COMPUTING Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2010; 10:101–114 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/wcm.901 TinyNET—a tiny network framework for TinyOS: description, implementation, and experimentation ‡ Angelo Paolo Castellani ∗,† , Paolo Casari and Michele Zorzi Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Via G. Gradenigo, 6/B, 35131 Padova, Italy Summary In this paper we present TinyNET, a modular framework allowing development and quick integration of protocols and applications for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in TinyOS. The motivation behind TinyNET is two-fold: on one hand it allows to adopt a divide-and-conquer approach in the development of any TinyOS application; on the other hand it provides a flexible administration of network protocols. As a sample development using TinyNET, we consider an environmental monitoring application, and test it over a floor-wide WSN testbed. Data are converge- casted toward a sink node, which gathers all data collected by the sensors. Routing toward the sink is achieved by means of a hop count (HC) based algorithm. Our framework also integrates support for the 6LowPAN standard (providing, e.g., per-sensor queries and pings). Thanks to TinyNET, s these messages will make transparent use of the underlying network protocols. Also, TinyNET transparently manages the network components and related messages, allowing different applications to share the same network stack; furthermore, it translates TinyOS interfaces so that any previously developed application can be easily ported. These features make it possible to have a global vision over any application, as well as to focus on each of its separate components. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: TinyOS; modular networking framework; 6LowPAN; monitoring application 1. Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for a number of applications to be implemented in the near future. These applications are growing beyond simple data collection, localization, and information retrieval services, to incorporate increasingly complex features such as smart sensing, ∗ Correspondence to: Angelo Castellani, Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Via G. Gradenigo 6/B, 35131 Padova, Italy. † E-mail: castellani@dei.unipd.it ‡ Part of this work has been presented at the 5th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), Leipzig, Germany, June 2009. assisted navigation, and sensory extension. It can be foreseen that many solutions by different distributors will undergo full-fledged development and find their way to the market, e.g., see Reference [1]. From a developer’s point of view, it would be very convenient to create new software for WSNs based on the reuse of as many program components as possible, taken from both open-source and proprietary Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.