Developing Domain-Specific Language for Wireless Sensor Network application development

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a potential for a wide scope of uses in the real-world environment. However, WSN application development is considered a challenging and complex task because of the complexity in low-level details, which a developer must deal with. Besides most of the current application development is done using node-centric, low-level languages such as C. In order to make the WSN technology more ubiquitous, application development complexity needs to be reduced, and development efficiency increased. This paper describes SenNet language, which is a new approach to WSN application development using a Domain-Specific Language (DSL). SenNet empowers application developers by allowing them to focus on modelling the application logic rather than the programming and low-level technical details. The new approach gives the ability to write applications using multi-abstraction levels (i.e. network, group, and node-level). Furthermore, evaluation results show that SenNet reduces the cognitive effort needed for learning WSN application development in addition to the time required to write the application by using automated code generation from abstracted language commands.