Architecture-Driven Development Approach for WSAN Applications

Abstract

Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) are highly heterogeneous regarding hardware, software, and application requirements. Developing WSAN applications is a hard task, as it requires domain and network knowledge and there is a lack of methodologies, architectures, and patterns to help software developers with such task. Moreover, non-functional requirements play an essential role to ensure the application and network performance, and must be taken into account from the early stages of application development. We propose a ModelDriven Architecture framework to develop WSAN applications that enables developers to express functional and non-functional requirements. The framework encompasses a generic middleware meta-model including: (i) features shared among different WSAN middleware, (ii) meta-model of a target middleware including features of a specific WSAN middleware, and (iii) model transformations. We evaluate our approach by verifying the support to specify non-functional requirements and the automatic code generation of a middleware tailored to the requirements ofa target application.