67 research outputs found
Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things
Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging
because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of
separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both
the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the
application development have to address issues that can be attributed to
different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the
application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of
distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be
implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they
have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application
requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the
closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive
computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges.
However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned
challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach
for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this
paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application
development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to
develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the
development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development
framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development
concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It
integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide
automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by
producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the
application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support
the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a
distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation
based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves
the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development
Supporting Cyber-Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook of Software and Services
Sensing, communication, computation and control technologies are the essential building blocks of a cyber-physical system (CPS). Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a way to support CPS as they provide fine-grained spatial-temporal sensing, communication and computation at a low premium of cost and power. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts guiding the design and implementation of WSNs. We report the latest developments in WSN software and services for meeting existing requirements and newer demands; particularly in the areas of: operating system, simulator and emulator, programming abstraction, virtualization, IP-based communication and security, time and location, and network monitoring and management. We also reflect on the ongoing
efforts in providing dependable assurances for WSN-driven CPS. Finally, we report on its applicability with a case-study on smart buildings
A Compilation Framework for Macroprogramming Networked Sensors
Abstract. Macroprogramming—the technique of specifying the behavior of the system, as opposed to the constituent nodes—provides application developers with high level abstractions that alleviate the programming burden in develop- ing wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. However, as the semantic gap between macroprogramming abstractions and node-level code is considerably wider than in traditional programming, converting the high level specification to running code is a daunting process, and a major hurdle to the acceptance of macroprogramming.
In this paper, we propose a general compilation framework for a data-driven macroprogramming language that allows for plugging in different modules implementing various stages of compilation. We also demonstrate an actual instantiation of our framework by showing an end-to-end solution for compiling macro- programs. Our compiler provides the final code to be deployed on real nodes as well as an estimate of the costs the running system will incur, e.g., in terms of messages exchanged. We compared the auto-generated code against a hand- coded version for the same application behavior to verify the outcome of our compiler
Enabling High-Level Application Development in the Internet of Things
International audienceThe sensor networking field is evolving into the Internet of Things~(IoT), owing in large part to the increased availability of consumer sensing devices, including modern smart phones. However, application development in the IoT still remains challenging, since it involves dealing with several related issues, such as lack of proper identification of roles of various stakeholders, as well as lack of suitable (high-level) abstractions to address the large scale and heterogeneity in IoT systems. Although the software engineering community has proposed several approaches to address the above in the general case, existing approaches for IoT application development only cover limited subsets of above mentioned challenges. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage model-driven approach for IoT application development based on a precise definition of the role to be played by each stakeholder involved in the process -- domain expert, application designer, application developer, device developer, and network manager. The abstractions provided to each stakeholder are further customized using the inputs provided in the earlier stages by other stakeholders. We have also implemented code-generation and task-mapping techniques to support our approach. Our initial evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our techniques/framework succeeds in improving productivity in the IoT application development process
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