Programming Approaches and Challenges for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute a new pervasive and ubiquitous technology. They have been successfully used in various application areas and in future computing environments, WSNs will play an increasingly important role. However, programming sensor networks and applications to be deployed in them is extremely challenging. It has traditionally been an error-prone task since it requires programming individual nodes, using low-level programming issues and interfacing with the hardware and the network. This aspect is currently changing as different highlevel programming abstractions and middleware solutions are coming into the arena. Nevertheless, many research challenges are still open. This paper presents a survey of the current state-of-the-art in the field, establishing a classification and highlighting some likely research challenges and future directions.

A Review on Run-Time Reconfigurations and Code Update Mechanisms in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In [19], ReWise a new component based middleware is proposed to Home monitoring application to enable reconfiguration of WSN. In this application, five different types of sensor node including temperature, smoke detector, occupancy detector, in-bed detector and humidity are deployed.…”

Intelligible TinyOS Sensor Systems: Explanations for Embedded Software

“…A natural consequence is that this efficiency in programming limits expressivity and consequently intelligibility of the resulting application. This last fact explains why embedded software engineering is still in the domain of professional programmers; intuitive programming abstractions and middleware [4] for embedded systems are still in their infancy, and research on end-user software engineering [5] for embedded systems is yet to develop.…”

Programming a Sensor Network in a layered middleware architecture

“…Current research papers agree that one of the critical points to leverage on the potential usefulness of WSNs is the possibility of abstracting common WSNs problems by means of convenient middleware, but literature is not coherent when defining what a middleware is (Albano et Al., 2007-1;Bai et Al., 2009;Chu & Buyya, 2007;Hadim & Mohamed, 2006;Mottola & Picco, 2008;Rahman, 2009;Romer et Al., 2002;Rubio et Al., 2007;Sugihara et Al., 2008;Tong, 2009;Wang et Al., 2008). To this purpose we focus on the goals that a middleware has to achieve.…”

“…For example, Maté has been defined as a process based approach, see Wang et Al. (2008), or as a virtual machine approach, see Rubio et Al. (2007).…”