CMoflon: Model-Driven Generation of Embedded C Code for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an indispensable part of the emerging Internet of Things. The topology of a WSN is a graph representing the sensor nodes and their interconnecting links. To reduce the energy consumption of a WSN, a topology control algorithm inactivates inessential links, and the sensor nodes reduce their transmission power while preserving crucial integrity properties (e.g., connectivity). In previous work, we have shown that model-driven engineering allows to prototype topology control algorithms that (i) preserve the specified integrity properties and (ii) can be rapidly evaluated in a network simulator. In this paper, we complement our approach by proposing cMoflon, an open-source tool that generates embedded C code for hardware sensor testbeds. The target platform is the Contiki WSN operating system. To show the applicability of cMoflon, we generate code for three representative topology control algorithms: kTC, l*-kTC, and LMST. A comparison of the generated topology control algorithms with their manually tuned counterparts for TelosB sensor nodes shows that cMoflon generates embedded code that is competitive w.r.t. code memory usage.