Evaluation of a Genetic Programming Approach to Generate Wireless Sensor Network Applications

This article presents a systematic evaluation of a framework based on Genetic Programming (GP) which aims the automatic generation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Developing WSN applications poses a challenge due to massive distribution of the network nodes. The automatic generation of applications reduces drastically costs, since the manual development is a laborious process. In our approach, the user describes the desired global behavior as a fitness function which guides the evolution of the application by the GP. A scripting language based on events and actions is used to represent the WSN behavior and the GP generates programs in this language. In order to evaluate the framework, a problem of multiple events detection is introduced. Several problem instances were used to appraise the performance of our method under different parameters. Results evidence the feasibility of our approach for the proposed problem, highlighting the challenges posed by the large search space and the dead end routing problem.