Collaborative Research: NeTS-NOSS: Sensor Network Synthesis - Opening the Use of Wireless Sensor Networks to Application Experts

无线传感器网络有可能给需要分布式数据收集和聚合的研究领域和行业带来革命性的变化，例如土木工程、生物和地质。然而，到目前为止，他们的影响还没有达到这一潜力。这并不令人惊讶；无线传感器网络很难设计和编程。生物和土木工程等应用领域的专家既没有受过开发足够的无线传感器网络所需的嵌入式系统编程和设计方面的培训，也没有成为嵌入式系统设计师的时间和意愿。为了发挥无线传感器网络的潜力，它们必须易于应用专家设计和编程，而不是需要嵌入式系统设计专家。本项目旨在将无线传感器网络的设计和部署置于应用专家的能力范围之内。该项目将确定一小部分应用程序原型，这些原型以对应用程序开发人员有意义的术语描述，它们捕获了最常见的应用程序结构。每个原型都有一个用简单的高级原型专用语言编写的可编译规范作为支持。定制后，规范将被传递给合成算法，以产生工作的硬件-软件系统。如果没有合适的硬件-软件平台，合成高效的无线传感器网络将是困难的。因此，该项目还将确定支持各种原型所需的特定类型的硬件和软件组件。将根据这些调查结果开发一个可配置的硬件-软件平台。

Wireless sensor networks have the potential to revolutionize research areas andindustries that require the distributed collection and aggregation of data,e.g., civil engineering, biology, and geology. However, to date their impacthas fallen short of this potential. This is not surprising; wireless sensornetworks are difficult to design and program. Experts in application domainssuch as biology and civil engineering have neither the training in embeddedsystem programming and design required to develop adequate wireless sensornetworks, nor the time or inclination to become embedded systems designers.For wireless sensor networks to live up to their potential, they must be easyfor application experts to design and program instead of requiring embeddedsystems design expertise.This project seeks to put wireless sensor network design and deployment withinthe reach of applications experts. This project will identify a small set ofapplication archetypes, described in terms meaningful to applicationdevelopers, that capture the most common application structures. Eacharchetype will be backed by a compilable specification written in a simplehigh-level archetype-specific language. After customization, a specificationwill be passed to a synthesis algorithm to produce a working hardware-softwaresystem. Synthesis of efficient wireless sensor networks would be intractablewithout an appropriate hardware-software platform. Therefore, this projectwill also determine the particular types of hardware and software componentsnecessary to enable support for wide range of archetypes. A configurablehardware-software platform will be developed based on these findings.