Wireless Sensor Networks

Versatile and effective, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) witness a continuous expansion of their application domains. Yet, their use is still hindered by issues such as reliability, lifetime, overall cost, design effort and multidisciplinary engineering knowledge, which often prove to be daunting for application domain experts. Several WSN design models, tools and techniques were proposed to solve these contrasting objectives, but no single comprehensive approach has emerged. With these criteria in mind we review several of the most representative ones, then we focus on two of the most effective hardware/software codesign flows. Both offer high-level design entry interfaces based on StateCharts. One allows manual module composition in a full application, and automates its mapping on a user-defined architecture for fast high-level design space exploration. The other flow automates module composition starting from the application specification and by reusing library modules. It can generate the hardware specification and the software to program and configure the WSN nodes. For these we show the typical use for the development of some representative applications, to evaluate their effectiveness.