SADUM- Easy development for sensor networks

Placement: The current technological advances in the area of embedded systems and the need for interconnecting them using wireless communications technologies, led to the development of a new network concept in embedded systems - networks of sensors and actuators. Currently, sensor networks have many applications and gradually they started to invade areas where until now their use had not been considered. These applications, in turn, conditionate the architecture and components used for a sensor network. All developments for sensor networks components: sensors measurements, software and communications, depends on the specific application for which they are intended to. In this sense it would be interesting to have a virtualization of these physical devices connected in the network so that the application programmer only has to worry about the interface. There are already abstractions that allow us to view a sensor network as a distributed database where we can make queries looking for a certain information. However, this approach is far from being a generic solution as the type of interactions is limited. In GEMS has been explored tools to describe the resources available in a network. An example of it is the SARDA project.

Objectives: The aim is to dispose of something different - a system in which we advertise (or register at certain points) the nodes capabilities, similar to what was done in SARDA, and a middleware that hides the peculiarities of realization in the OS that runs the applications of network nodes. This middleware already exists, is called Modulus, and speeds up the process of creating and maintaining applications. The aim in this project is to develop a toolkit based on Modulus, allowing a rapid prototyping of an application. It is intended a concept similar to the widgets within graphical interfaces, where there is a network resource library (sensors / actuators and their characteristics, possible functions on each node, etc) that the programmer has access to, and in a graphical easy way connect different components to build an application with those resources.

Description: Beginning with the previous Modulus framework , developed in GEMS (Modulus), set a virtualization to a pilot sensor network, implementing a set of simple applications.
This solution will involve:

  1. Bibliographic search;
  2. Analysis requirements;
  3. Study of Modulus implementation;
  4. Toolkit development and its graphical environment;
  5. Demonstration of an application in a proper environment.

Orientation: Rui M. Rocha