Meta-Debugging Pervasive Computers

As computers get more complex, the task of programming them gets more complex as well. This is especially true for the “Pervasive Computer”, which is a massively distributed system consisting of unreliable embedded devices that communicate with each other over lousy wireless links. A common approach to address the programming problem is to offer programming abstractions that hide certain aspects of the complexity from the programmer. While several such abstractions and mappings thereof to low-level target languages have been proposed, there is a glaring lack of debugging support. It is typically impossible to debug at the conceptual level offered by the programming abstractions, instead one has to resort to debugging the generated target code. In this position paper we argue that programming abstractions should be designed in a way that allows debugging at the same conceptual level as programming. We further present requirements for such debugging tools, a taxonomy of programming abstractions and discuss debugging challenges, existing solutions, and potential approaches in each class.