Developing Service Oriented Sensor/Actuator Networks Using a Tailored Middleware

Programming sensor/actuator networks requires expertise in low-level programming, mainly because of using resource constraint hardware. The code of the resulting systems has typically no clear separation between application and system (infrastructure) logic.This minimizes the possibility to reuse code and leads very often to the necessity of major changes, in case the underlying platform (hardware or operating system) is changed. In this paper, we present a model driven approach based on the service oriented paradigm to support the different parties involved in the development, namely platform experts, domain experts and end users. The goal of our approach is to enable the use of pre-implemented services in a potentially heterogeneous sensor/actuator network that can be easily combined to form an application. The interaction of these components is implemented by a middleware. To address the resource constraints, this middleware is tailored for each application and platform using a domain specific development tool. The platform experts can expand the code generator to support further platforms and features. Domain experts provide services and describe a potential interaction between different services.The end users can select, configure and combine adequate services to form a running application.