Wireless Sensor Network Application Development : An Architecture-Centric MDE Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a very promising research field since they find application in many different areas. Current proposals for WSN system development are mainly focused on implementation issues and they rarely rely on a Software Engineering methodology which supports their entire development life-cycle. The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach can contribute to solve this problem by allowing designers to model their systems at different abstraction levels, providing them with automatic model transformations to incrementally refine abstract models into more concrete ones. In this vein, this paper presents a MDE approach to WSN application development. Three levels of abstraction have been defined which allow designers to build: (1) domain-specific models, (2) component-based architecture descriptions, and (3) platform-specific models. Automatic model transformations between these three abstraction levels have been designed and, in order to demonstrate the viability of the proposal, a real WSN application has been developed using the implemented tools.