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，例如，土木工程，生物学和地质学。 然而，迄今为止，它们的影响力没有达到这一潜力。 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，也没有时间或倾向于成为嵌入式系统设计师。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设计和部署在应用专家的能力范围内。 这个项目将确定一个小的应用程序原型集，描述的条款有意义的应用程序开发人员，捕捉最常见的应用程序结构。 每一个原型都有一个可编译的规范作为后盾，该规范是用一种简单的高级的特定于原型的语言编写的。在定制之后，一个规格将被传递到一个综合算法，以产生一个工作的硬件-软件系统。 如果没有合适的软硬件平台，有效的无线传感器网络的合成将是困难的。 因此，该项目还确定了支持广泛的原型所需的硬件和软件组件的特定类型。 一个可配置的硬件软件平台将根据这些发现。

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.