A Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have grown considerably in recent years and have a significant potential in different applications including health, environment, and military. Despite their powerful capabilities, the successful development of WSN is still a challenging task.
In current real-world WSN deployments, several programming approaches have been proposed, which focus on low-level system issues. In order to simplify the design of the WSN and abstract from technical low-level details, high-level approaches have been recognized and several solutions have been proposed.
In particular, the model-driven engineering (MDE) approach is becoming a promising solution. In this paper, we present a survey of existing programming methodologies and model-based approaches for the development of sensor networks.
We recall and classify existing related WSN development approaches. The main objective of our research is to investigate the feasibility and the application of high-level-based approaches to ease WSN design. We concentrate on a set of criteria to highlight the shortcomings of the relevant approaches. Finally, we present our future directions to cope with the limits of existing solutions.
1. Introduction
WSNs have become an integral part of diverse applications such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and medicine by providing feasible communication, reliable inspection, and performing applications.
WSNs are composed of a large number of sensor nodes which are densely deployed and wireless Sensors to send and receive environmental information. Each sensor node is equipped at least with one or more sensors, a radio transceiver, a processor, and a power supply section.
The development of WSNs becomes a very challenging task due to the complexity of such systems. Additionally, several important requirements need to be satisfied during the design of WSN such as the power consumption requirement, which represents the primary key.
For this reason, many current researches focus on surveying WSNs. In, authors described the concept of WSNs and their characteristics. They described the generations, routing, architecture, and storage management of WSN. Other surveys give an overview of existing routing protocols for sensor networks.
In authors presented several existing middleware for sensor networks. In authors reviewed several sensor localization techniques and hierarchical taxonomy and their applications in different context. They presented new sensor localization schemes and their implementation for IoT infrastructure.
In the same context, authors presented a survey on sensors’ device-free localization for smart world. In , authors surveyed 9 WSN modeling techniques. They presented how each technique describes the node behavior and the network behavior.
They presented also the modeling tool for each approach. However, few works surveyed and discussed the main state of the practice programming approaches and modeling techniques currently used to develop WSN. Motivated by this idea, we present in this work a study that aggregates and discusses existing WSN design methodologies.
We survey low-level-based approaches that focus on the implementation level and high-level-based approaches that rely on model concept to design WSN systems. The main objective of our research is to investigate the feasibility and the application of high-level-based approaches that help decrease the complexity of the development of WSN systems and to improve maintainability and portability.
At present, great attention has been attracted to high-level abstraction design based on MDE methodology and especially using standard mechanisms such as the Modeling and Analysis of Real Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) profile and design patterns.
