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Wireless sensor networks have the potential to revolutionize research areas
and industries that require the distributed collection and aggregation of data,
e.g., civil engineering, biology, and geology. However, to date their impact
has fallen short of this potential. This is not surprising; wireless sensor
networks are difficult to design and program. Experts in application domains
such as biology and civil engineering have neither the training in embedded
system programming and design required to develop adequate wireless sensor
networks, nor the time or inclination to become embedded systems designers.
For wireless sensor networks to live up to their potential, they must be easy
for application experts to design and program instead of requiring embedded
systems design expertise.
This project seeks to put wireless sensor network design and deployment
within the reach of applications experts. This project will identify a small
set of application archetypes, described in terms meaningful to application
developers, that capture the most common application structures. Each
archetype will be backed by a compilable specification written in a simple
high-level archetype-specific language. After customization, a specification
will be passed to a synthesis algorithm to produce a working hardware-software
system. Synthesis of efficient wireless sensor networks would be intractable
without an appropriate hardware-software platform. Therefore, this project
will also determine the particular types of hardware and software components
necessary to enable support for wide range of archetypes. A configurable
hardware-software platform will be developed based on these findings.
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