Sens4U: Wireless sensor network applications for environment monitoring made easy

Abstract

The development of wireless sensor network (WSN) or cyber physical systems (CPS) applications is a complex and error prone task. This is due to the huge number of possible combinations of protocols and other software modules, to choose from. Additionally, testing of the chosen configuration and the individual software modules is not a trivial task, especially in case where they are all implemented from scratch. The aim of the Sens4U methodology we present in this paper is to simplify and possibly automate the process of building a WSN application and to simplify its testing. The main idea of our approach is to exploit the modularity of the available libraries in order to speed-up application development done by non-WSN-experts and to solve the real-life problems. The proposed abstraction is very powerful-the modules provide specific functionalities via defined interfaces and can be connected using these according to the application requirements, to create the desired and minimum target configuration. The modularity improves the testability and reuse of components and thus, their reliability and, as a result, the reliability of the target configurations. Further, the Sens4U approach goes beyond pure software generation and supports creating software and hardware configurations. We are currently focusing on environment monitoring scenarios in order to analyze this problem area in the semi-automatic computer aided application logic generalization process. This paper presents the general concept as well as the tool chain that supports the application development done by non-WSN-experts.