A service-oriented approach to facilitate WSAN application development

Due to the complex nature of developing Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN) applications it is obvious that new frameworks, tools, middleware and higher-level abstractions are needed to make the task of the developers easier. Depending on the WSAN system we want to develop, different characteristics must be taken into account but, perhaps, some of the most important are the capacity to add real-time constraints, the QoS and, of course energy saving. Our proposal USEME is a service-oriented and component-based framework which allows the easy combination of macro-programming and node-centric programming to develop real-time and efficient applications over WSANs. USEME allows the specification of real-time constraints between services, permits the use of groups to structure the network and is platform independent. Two prototypes (Imote2.Net and SunSPOT) have been implemented and several performance tests have been carried out. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.