Open Systems Laboratory at Illinois

ActorNet

ActorNet is a platform for actor-based programming of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). ActorNet's extremely lightweight interpreter can operate on low-power sensor nodes with as little as 4KB RAM. ActorNet programs are written in a compact, Scheme-based syntax.

Actor programs consist of concurrent entities (Actors) that communicate by asynchronous message-passing. The model is inherently concurrent. There is no shared state among Actors and therefore the model is free from low-level data races. The wikipedia page and this article on concurrent object-oriented programming have more details about the model.

Features

  • High level, actor-based platform for WSN applications
  • Functional programming language
  • Agent-based programming and mobile code
  • Low memory and bandwidth requirements
  • Virtual memory and garbage collection support
  • Mobility
  • Location independence

Downloads

Documentation

The README includes details on building and running ActorNet. The distribution includes some example actor programs (with source) to get one started.

License

The ActorNet software is NOT in the public domain. However, it is freely available without fee for education, research, and non-profit purposes. Read the complete ActorNet license.

History

ActorNet was originally designed and implemented for the Mica2 WSN platform in 2005 by YoungMin Kwon, Kirill Mechitov, and Sameer Sundresh, all members of the Open Systems Laboratory at that time. It has since been extended and maintained by Kirill Mechitov.

Contact

Please contact us with any questions or clarifications, and to report bugs.

Kirill Mechitov