Mohammad Mostafizur Rahman Mozumdar

A Framework for Modeling, Simulation and Automatic Code Generation of Sensor Network Application

Showing functional correctness by simulation before implementation, and preserving it by automated code generation, is extremely useful to reduce the development time for an embedded application. This is even more true for wireless sensor networks, since their nodes often provide very rudimentary debugging facilities, and sufficiently large networks for realistic analysis may be expensive to deploy. While this approach, also known as model-based design, is becoming quite standard for several domains that have similar constraints as wireless sensor networks, such as automotive electronics, there is a lack of tools for this purpose in the WSN world. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we present a framework (based on Simulink, Stateflow and Embedded Coder) in which an engineer can create sensor network components (both at the application and at the protocol level) that can be used as building blocks to model, simulate and automatically generate code for different underlying platforms and operating systems.

An Efficient Data Aggregation Algorithm for Cluster-based Sensor Network

Data aggregation in wireless sensor networks eliminates redundancy to improve bandwidth utilization and energyefficiency of sensor nodes. One node, called the cluster leader, collects data from surrounding nodes and then sends the summarized information to upstream nodes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to select a cluster leader that will perform data aggregation in a partially connected sensor network. The algorithm reduces the traffic flow inside the network by adaptively selecting the shortest route for packet routing to the cluster leader. We also describe a simulation framework for functional analysis of WSN applications taking our proposed algorithm as an example.

A comparison of software platforms for wireless sensor networks: MANTIS, TinyOS, and ZigBee

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by very tight code size and power constraints and by a lack of well-established standard software development platforms such as Posix. In this article, we present a comparative study between a few fairly different such platforms, namely MANTIS, TinyOS, and ZigBee, when considering them from the application developers perspective, that is, by focusing mostly on functional aspects, rather than on performance or code size. In other words, we compare both the tasking model used by these platforms and the API libraries they offer. Sensor network applications are basically event based, so most of the software platforms are also built on considering event handling mechanism, however some use a more traditional thread based model. In this article, we consider implementations of a simple generic application in MANTIS, TinyOS, and the Ember ZigBee development framework, with the goal of depicting major differences between these platforms, and suggesting a programming style aimed at maximizing portability between them.

Porting application between wireless sensor network software platforms: TinyOS, MANTIS and ZigBee

Application domains of wireless sensor networks are emerging day-by-day, so developers are creating software components at various layers by using platforms such as MANTIS, TinyOS or ZigBee. Since these platforms are quite different in terms of programming paradigm and provided APIs, porting applications between them is difficult and expensive. In this paper, we show techniques that might be used to dramatically ease the porting application code between different software platforms for WSNs.

A Model-Based Approach for Bridging Virtual and Physical Sensor Nodes in a Hybrid Simulation Framework

The Model Based Design (MBD) approach is a popular trend to speed up application development of embedded systems, which uses high-level abstractions to capture functional requirements in an executable manner, and which automates implementation code generation. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging very promising application area for embedded systems. However, there is a lack of tools in this area, which would allow an application developer to model a WSN application by using high level abstractions, simulate it mapped to a multi-node scenario for functional analysis, and finally use the refined model to automatically generate code for different WSN platforms. Motivated by this idea, in this paper we present a hybrid simulation framework that not only follows the MBD approach for WSN application development, but also interconnects a simulated sub-network with a physical sub-network and then allows one to co-simulate them, which is also known as Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation.

An Algorithm for Selecting the Cluster Leader in a Partially Connected Sensor Network

Data aggregation is a basic mechanism that is used to reduce the traffic flow in sensor networks. In this mechanism, one node basically the cluster leader collects data from surrounding nodes and then sends the summarized information to upstream nodes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to select cluster leader that will perform data aggregation in a partially connected sensor network. The algorithm also reduces the traffic flow inside the network by adaptively selecting the shortest route for packet routing to the cluster leader.

Rapid Application Development for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last decade, the landscape of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications has been extending rapidly in many fields such as factory and building automation, environmental monitoring, security systems and in a wide variety of commercial and military areas. Advancements in microelectro-mechanical systems and wireless communication have motivated the development of small and low power sensors and radio equipped modules which are now replacing traditional wired sensor systems. These tiny modules usually called “motes” can communicate with each other by radio and act like as neurons to collect information from the environment. Platforms for WSNs, including processors, sensors, radios, power supplies, operating systems and protocol stacks, are almost as diverse as the application areas, with only a few standards (e.g. TinyOS (Levis et al., 2004) and the ZigBee (2006) protocol), which are still far from being universally recognized and truly interoperable. Application development for WSNs is quite challenging, because in principle it would require both detailed knowledge of the application area and of the available hardware and software platforms. Moreover, design aids, in the form of both functional simulation, power and performance analysis and on-target debugging are still very rudimentary. Many hardware and software platforms include only LEDs as a debugging aid. The available functional analysis packages, such as TOSSIM (Levis et al., 2003) for debugging of TinyOS application, OmNet (1992) and NS-2 (2001), fall into two main categories. One is very platform- and OS-specific (such as TOSSIM), and provides essentially a binary API to model the OS and the motes, with limited facilities for re-using existing channel models, tracing, collecting statistics and so on. The other are generic network simulators (such as OmNet, NS, etc.), sometimes enhanced with models tailored to the radios and channels used by WSNs. Both have significant drawbacks when it comes to complex application development. The first group makes it virtually impossible to port an application to a different platform (e.g. from TinyOS to MANTIS (Bhatti et al., 2005) or to a