FLEXOR: User friendly wireless sensor network development and deployment

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) penetrated the market mainly as solutions for specific application scenarios. However, this strong specialization limits WSNs reuse both in terms of development as well as in terms of technical results: Every new application scenario requires a new design, development and validation, as well as management skills. This is frustrating for any WSNs user, developer or manager. To reverse this tendency and thus improve the quality of experience and user-friendliness in WSNs, we designed FLEXOR, a sustainable software architecture optimized to support the implementation, rapid prototyping, evaluation, and testing of wireless sensor network applications, that is platform independent and user-friendly. FLEXOR is designed to accommodate many different applications and services for wireless sensor networks and foster code re-usability and cross-platform component re-usability. FLEXOR offers high modularity, well defined interfaces, remote node management functionality as well as run-time module exchange. Finally, the introduction of a unifying way for WSNs development opens to a higher homogeneity and thus to more easy comparison among different solutions. We present here an analysis of FLEXOR from these new angles and show how effective it is for several purposes and in particular for non-experts and in education.