Models and Tradeoffs in WSN System-Level Design

System-level design of WSNs includes the selection of the sensing nodes and their dissemination in the environment to be monitored. Many design choices have to be taken during this stage of the development of the application. The goal of this paper is to present a methodology to specify formally the desired behavior of the sensing application and to derive an optimal selection and placement of the network nodes. The approach is flexible and powerful, since it allows the designer to analyze the impact of clustering sensors onto a reduced set of boards (nodes) and to perform sensitivity analysis on parameters such as type of sensor, position of the nodes, observation time, presence of faults, etc. The paper introduces the concepts with some representative examples as well as by considering bigger use cases extracted from international projects.