A model-driven engineering framework for architecting and analysing Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of distributed sensors with limited processing capabilities and energy restrictions. These unique attributes pose new challenges amongst which prolonging the WSN lifetime is one of the most important. Challenges are often tackled by a code-and-fix process that relies on low-level hardware and software information. Recently, the need of abstracting an implementation view into an architectural design is getting more realized. A clear separation of concerns is needed since hardware and software aspects are locked and tied down to specific types of nodes, hampering the possibility of reuse across projects and organizations. This means that exploiting the right level of abstraction, and keeping explicit (and separated) software and hardware architectural details will surely ease developers´ job. In this paper we propose a modeling framework that allows developers to model separately the software architecture of the WSN, the low-level hardware specification of the WSN nodes and the physical environment where nodes are deployed in. The framework can use these models to generate executable code for analysis purposes. In this paper we focus on energy consumption analysis.