High-Level Application Development for Sensor Networks: Data-Driven Approach

Abstract

Owing to the large scale of networked sensor systems, ease of programming remains a hurdle in their wide acceptance. High-level application development techniques, or macroprogramming provides an easy-to-use high-level representation to the application developer, who can focus on specifying the behavior of the system, as opposed to the constituent nodes of the wireless sensor network (WSN). This chapter provides an overview of the current approaches to high-level application design for WSNs, going into the details related to data-driven macroprogramming. Details of one such language are provided, in addition to the approach taken to the compilation of data-driven macroprograms to node-level code. An implementation of the modular compilation framework is also discussed, as well as a graphical toolkit built around it that supports data-driven macroprogramming. Through experiments, it is shown that the code generated by the compiler matches hand-generated implementations of the applications, while drastically reducing the time and effort involved in developing real-world WSN applications.