Tool-Supported Methodology for Component-Based Design of Wireless Sensor Network Applications

A major issue when developing Wireless sensor networks applications is the need for highly specialized knowledge in the field of embedded programming, networking and in the application domain. In order to speed up the development process, a new methodology for WSN application development is required. It needs to provide ready to use building blocks as well as means to map application requirements to technical features provided by these blocks. Last but not least, mechanisms to select appropriate building blocks and to evaluate the system compiled out of these blocks are essentially needed. This paper presents a design flow fulfilling the mentioned features. In a first step, user requirements elicited from a managed catalog are translated to a graph structure. Then, properties of the composed system derived from meta-information of the applied components are evaluated to resolve constraints --representing application requirements and/or features of the target system-- in the derived system model. The validity of the methodology, for which the needed tool support has actually been implemented, is shown in an example that illustrates how this approach can propose correct configurations for secure systems as proposed in related work. Since the approach allows designing correct and fine-tuned solutions even for general application requirements we consider it to be a significant step towards improved programmability of WSN nodes.