Introducing Microsoft mPlatform

mPlatform is a project from Microsoft Research built under the leadership of Feng Zhao, Microsoft Research Principal Researcher. Defined as "a reconfigurable architecture and efficient data sharing mechanism for modular sensor nodes", mPlatform is essentially a collection of multiple heterogeneous processors designed to permit real-time processing. With the research project Zhao aims to provide a modular network platform for sensornet applications. Building hardware from scratch will no longer be necessary as mPlatform will permit existing modules to be bundled together into sensors that can be set up to meet specific requirements of application and research scenarios.

"It's all about tinkering," Zhao explained, as cited by Chanel 10. "Instead of trying to write software to live with existing hardware limitations, researchers ought to be able to aggregate hardware to suit their software needs and debug the application logic before fabricating and deploying these devices at scale�People can start using these platforms to build interesting applications quickly. We take some of the common things out of these different applications, embedded application prototypes in the main, and let users focus more on thinking about the sort of applications they want to build."

One critical aspect that recommends mPlatform over alternative embedded system platforms is the fact that it features a processor for each module. However, on the surface, the sensor network delivers a common user interface which is shared by the underlying stackable hardware modules. The modules are built around circuit boards that can easily be connected to one another scaling in order to meet the specific needs of a project.

"Some of the mPlatform modules are general purpose processing boards while others are special purpose boards such as radio boards for wireless communication, sensor boards for sensing physical phenomena, and power boards for supplying power to a stack of modules. Each board, except for the power board, has a local processor. Having a local processor on each module enables efficient real-time event handling, one of the major design goals of mPlatform. The processor-per-module approach also allows a more customizable aggregation of processing power appropriate for a given application," Microsoft revealed.