Rapid application development for wireless sensor networks

In the last decade, the landscape of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications has been extending rapidly in many fields such as factory and building automation, environmental monitoring, security systems and in a wide variety of commercial and military areas. Advancements in microelectro-mechanical systems and wireless communication have motivated the development of small and low power sensors and radio equipped modules which are now replacing traditional wired sensor systems. These tiny modules usually called “motes” can communicate with each other by radio and act like as neurons to collect information from the environment. Platforms for WSNs, including processors, sensors, radios, power supplies, operating systems and protocol stacks, are almost as diverse as the application areas, with only a few standards (e.g. TinyOS (Levis et al., 2004) and the ZigBee (2006) protocol), which are still far from being universally recognized and truly interoperable. Application development for WSNs is quite challenging, because in principle it would require both detailed knowledge of the application area and of the available hardware and software platforms. Moreover, design aids, in the form of both functional simulation, power and performance analysis and on-target debugging are still very rudimentary. Many hardware and software platforms include only LEDs as a debugging aid. The available functional analysis packages, such as TOSSIM (Levis et al., 2003) for debugging of TinyOS application, OmNet (1992) and NS-2 (2001), fall into two main categories. One is very platformand OS-specific (such as TOSSIM), and provides essentially a binary API to model the OS and the motes, with limited facilities for re-using existing channel models, tracing, collecting statistics and so on. The other are generic network simulators (such as OmNet, NS, etc.), sometimes enhanced with models tailored to the radios and channels used by WSNs. Both have significant drawbacks when it comes to complex application development. The first group makes it virtually impossible to port an application to a different platform (e.g. from TinyOS to MANTIS (Bhatti et al., 2005) or to a 5