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彻底改变需要分布式收集和聚合数据的研究领域和行业。、土木工程、生物学和地质学。然而，到目前为止，它们的影响还没有达到这一潜力。这并不奇怪；无线传感器网络很难设计和编程。生物学和土木工程等应用领域的专家既没有接受过嵌入式系统编程和设计方面的培训，也没有时间或倾向成为嵌入式系统设计师。为了使无线传感器网络发挥其潜力，它们必须易于应用专家设计和编程，而不需要嵌入式系统设计专业知识。该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范围内。这个项目将确定一小组应用程序原型，用对应用程序开发人员有意义的术语来描述，这些原型捕获了最常见的应用程序结构。每个原型都将由一个用简单的高级特定于原型的语言编写的可编译规范支持。定制后，将规格传递给合成算法，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，想要合成高效的无线传感器网络是非常困难的。因此，这个项目也将决定特定类型的硬件和软件组件，以支持广泛的原型。基于这些发现，将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.