A Service-Driven Development Tool for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Thanks to advances in the area of embedded low-power microprocessors and short-range wireless communication, pervasive technologies such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are easing the collection and integration of real-world data into ICT systems. However, developing and testing application logic for heterogeneous WSN devices remains a challenging and cumbersome task. In order to make prototyping of WSN solutions faster and less error-prone, in this paper we propose a set of development tools for WSNs based on object-oriented and service-driven models. Within these tools, applications are modelled as sets of interconnected blocks, each providing or using a number of services defined at design time. Externally, each block is a self-contained black-box exposing a set of service interfaces and tunable attributes; internally, an event-driven state-chart model represents its logical behaviour. All blocks are automatically created as skeleton templates by the tools, and then can be graphically developed and debugged in different hierarchical depths through widely used Mathworks c tools. Moreover, the developed functional blocks can be automatically converted to platform-specific binaries to ease deployment on actual devices (e.g. on TinyOS-based platforms) and large scale simulation (e.g. in MiXiM) enriched with HIL (Hardware In the Loop) capabilities.