High-Level Internet of Things Applications Development Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)-based data gathering solutions were envisioned from the beginning of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm because of their important characteristics such as low-cost, long-term versatile sensing and actuation capabilities, and distributed resilient bidirectional communications. However, many technologies converge into WSN platforms from several disciplines. Their complexity and rapid pace of change may prevent most WSN and IoT players to keep up, since they need to focus on low cost and short development time targets. Also important is the quality assurance to prevent the degradation of the overall reliability perception needed for wide WSN adoption. Consequently, a versatile and reusable WSN platform may benefit both industry and academic research by speeding up and facilitating the distributed WSN application programming. The framework presented provides the application developers with a set of development tools and software component libraries that allow high-level application architecture description, graphical definition and simulation of the component behaviour, and automatic generation of both network simulation models and code for target node programming.