Java Virtual Machine Based Infrastructure for Decent Wireless Sensor Network Development Environment

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have played an important role in diverse domains. However, programming on WSN nodes are quite hard because currently there exist no standard software and hardware platforms in WSN. Thus it´s essential to build a software infrastructure that can provide a decent development environment to the users. One sound choice to achieve this objective is to deploy embedded Java virtual machine (EJVM) on the WSN nodes. However, most sensor nodes are resources-constrained devices and WSN applications have some essential performance requirements as well, the feasibility of applying any EJVM on a WSN platform should be evaluated in advance. In this paper, an EJVM simpleRTJ is researched, chosen, ported and enhanced on the Live node platform equipped with AT91SAM7S256 micro controller. The experimental work proves that simpleRTJ is an advisable method for providing a decent WSN development environment. Yet the observed drawbacks such as the non-trivial RAM resource requirement and low executive efficiency restrict its employment on the high memory and energy resources constrained sensor nodes, e.g., the ones equipped with the micro controller ATMEGA1281. To address this challenge, an efficient middleware EMIDE is implemented complementally to substitute EJVM for meeting the challenge of implementation on the high resources-constrained WSN platforms. The performance evaluation work proves that EMIDE is an effective method to provide a decent WSN development environment as well as capable to be applied on the high resources-constrained sensor platforms.