Efficient middleware for user-friendly wireless sensor network integrated development environment

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have played an important role in widespread applicable domains. However, the programming and reprogramming processes in WSNs are complicate, this results from the diverse software and hardware platforms in WSNs, the constraint memory and energy resources on sensor nodes as well as the unstable wireless transmission process, etc. Thus, it's significant to design and implement an efficient user-friendly integrated development environment (IDE) for the WSN users. Several related mechanisms have been implemented, such as script language machines, dynamic linking mechanism, embedded Java virtual machine. But these methods are not suitable for the high resource-constraint sensor nodes. In this paper, a middleware named EMIDE is implemented for providing a user-friendly WSN IDE. This middleware simplifies the user programming process and improves the reprogramming performance by separating the application part from the low-level system one. Moreover, it provides sufficient functionalities for the application development and has low requirements to the memory and energy resources. To evaluate the performances of EMIDE, it is compared with Embedded Java Virtual Machine (simpleRTJ) and Contiki dynamic linking mechanisms in terms of resources consumption, application code size and execution efficiency. The obtained results show that EMIDE is an efficient method to provide a user-friendly WSN IDE, even on the high resource-constraint sensor nodes.