Deconstructing the Wireless Sensor Networks Architecture

Nowadays there is a trend in distributed systems research of applying software engineering and open standards in the development of large, robust and easily configurable systems, where the basic unit of replacement is the software component. Literature in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), a recently emerging technology, shows on the contrary, an abolition of these techniques as a response to the strong restrictions imposed by the hardware. Therefore, the current software created for WSN has features of the long time ago software: monolithic and platform dependent. This work studies the current state of the art in WSN and Model Driven Architecture (MDA), a standard used to drive the development of large distributed systems. The most important contribution of this paper is fusing both into an initial version of a feasible component-based middleware addressing the major challenges in WSN.