Question

I haven’t got any code at the moment but I have a situation where I will be implementing an Java application onto a wireless sensor. There can only be one main method.

There will be multiple other wireless sensors that can connect to my sensor. My sensor needs to do a calculation based on thhe information provided to me by the other sensors. Each sensor can choose whether or not they want to participate in the calculation. Every 1 second, my sensor does a calculation.

So basically, what I need is to listen for incoming sensors, provide them with a thread to interact with, and retrieve the information from each sensor.

My question is, in my application, how do I listen for incoming sensors (blocking call) and also free my application to carry out its calculations?

Answer 1

From a high level, this is what your application will do

==Main Thread==

1. start socket
2. Start processing thread
3. accept an incoming connection (this will cause the thread to block until a connection occurs)
4. start new thread to handle socket (handler thread) (alternatively use a thread pool, but that is more complicated)
5. return to 3

==Handler Thread==

1. Receive open socket from main thread
2. Save data coming in from socket to be given to processing thread
3. Finish and close socket

==Processing Thread==

1. Wait 1 second
2. Process data retrieved from step 2 of Handler Thread
3. Return to 1