Study Notes

Inter-Context Control-Flow and Data-Flow Test Adequacy Criteria for nesC Applications*
Zhifeng Lai and S.C. Cheung†
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Kowloon, Hong Kong

W.K. Chan
Department of Computer Science City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong

{zflai, scc}@cse.ust.hk

[e-mail]

ABSTRACT
NesC is a programming language for applications that run on top of networked sensor nodes. Such an application mainly uses an interrupt to trigger a sequence of operations, known as contexts, to perform its actions. However, a high degree of inter-context interleaving in an application can cause it to be error-prone. For instance, a context may mistakenly alter another context’s data kept at a shared variable. Existing concurrency testing techniques target testing programs written in general-purpose programming languages, where a small scale of inter-context interleaving between program executions may make these techniques inapplicable. We observe that nesC blocks new context interleaving when handling interrupts, and this feature significantly restricts the scale of inter-context interleaving that may occur in a nesC application. This paper models how operations on different contexts may interleave as inter-context flow graphs. Based on these graphs, it proposes two test adequacy criteria, one on inter-context data-flows and another on intercontext control-flows. It evaluates the proposal by a real-life open-source nesC application. The empirical results show that the new criteria detect significantly more failures than their conventional counterparts.

1. INTRODUCTION
NesC language [10] is designed for programming wireless sensor network (WSN) applications that are deployed on a collection of small low-powered low-capability devices known as motes. Each mote usually has sensing and wireless communication capabilities. WSN applications are useful for monitoring their

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