Generating a tailored middleware for wireless sensor network applications

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by resource constraints. Therefore, today's sensor networks are implemented from scratch emphasizing code efficiency. This development strategy leads to relatively complex code and bad code reusability in further projects. To improve reusability and development efficiency, it is state-of-the-art in the development of standard information systems to divide applications into at least two parts, the application-logic, providing all the functions to solve a given problem and a reusable distributed middleware providing a container for the application. After developing the middleware once, the developer of further projects need to focus only on the application-logic. Thereby, the development times can be reduced considerably. However, a generic middleware layer replacing code implemented from scratch is not practicable in sensor networks due to resource constraints. Within this paper, we will present a model-driven approach in combination with a template-based code generator to get the best of both development strategies. This approach enables us to generate a tailored middleware for our application including interface-stubs for the application-logic. In contrast to other component-based approaches, the templates can be adopted easily to fulfill specific platform needs. We will demonstrate the practicability of this approach by implementing the control of a model railway.