Simplified Commissioning and Maintenance for Wireless Sensor Networks: a Novel Software Tool

This paper presents a novel approach to simplify the commissioning and maintaining aspects of low-rate, low power wireless sensor networks. A software approach was designed to be accessible to a broad spectrum of users (from complete novices with little programming, or systems skills, to those familiar and practiced in the art). A method of abstraction, leveraging the MVC concepts developed at Xerox PARC during the 1970s, is applied to separate the system deployer and maintainer from the requirement to perform low-level systems-oriented (re)programming. We propose a number of functional and non-functional requirements relevant to successful construction of such a tool, and present our prototype implementation of the system in the context of wireless sensor networks for structural monitoring. The tool presented extends the state-of-the-art with regard to ease-of-use, extensibility, and scalability.