Putting Sense inside Sensor Systems: A Coordinated Approach to Messaging

Sensor network deployments, such as smart cities and smart logistics, are evolving towards open infrastructure on top of which multiple parties deploy and make use of each other´s application software. Of vital importance in such distributed settings, is an agreement on message semantics and contents. Yet, the current state-of-the-art in sensor programming typically remains low-level in terms of messaging, and lacks support for coordination across platforms and stakeholders. We present Talk Sens, a message definition framework that facilitates development of correctly interacting application logic by means of a shared data model, a message description language and serialisation code generation. Additionally, integration of Talk Sens with an existing component model results in run-time retrievable message definitions that facilitate third-party interactions. Our evaluation shows that message sizes, software sizes and middleware overhead remain well within the bounds of sensor network resource constraints.