Protothreads: Simplifying Event-Driven Programming of Memory-Constrained Embedded Systems

Event-driven programming is a popular model for writing programs for tiny embedded systems and sensor network nodes. While event-driven programming can keep the memory overhead down, it enforces a state machine programming style which makes many programs difficult to write, maintain, and debug. The authors present a novel programming abstraction called protothreads that makes it possible to write event-driven programs in a thread-like style, with a memory overhead of only two bytes per protothread. The authors show that protothreads significantly reduce the complexity of a number of widely used programs previously written with event-driven state machines.