Operating system support for handling heterogeneity in wireless sensor networks

Developments in wireless sensor networks (WSN) hardware have led to a diversity of sensing devices, ranging from simple, micro-controlled boards to complex, highly integrated sensor-transceiver ICs. Given this diversity, the lack of proper abstraction and encapsulation mechanisms at the operating system level often forces developers to reimplement their sensing applications whenever a different sensor, radio or processor is deployed. In this paper we introduce a novel strategy for abstracting wireless sensor networks hardware, implemented for the EPOS operating system. It consists in providing application programmers with a high level interface for sensing components, that can latter be bound to pre-existing components that are adapted on demand at system generation time to fulfill application requirements, thus enabling programmers to code portable sensing applications in spite of the hardware diversity and without significant overhead.