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Hardware and software platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are almost as diverse as their application areas, with very limited standardization. Moreover, heterogeneous programming abstractions put high barrier in application development and there is hardly any support for application debugging, except for a few blinking LEDs. Similar problems have been solved in application domains that have similar cost constraints, such as automotive, by the use of model-based design. We address the lack of model-based design tools for the WSN domain by providing a framework (based on Simulink, Stateflow and Stateflow Coder) in which an application developer can model a WSN application by using Stateflow constructs and then use a single model to perform multi-platform Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation and platform-specific application code generation.

— Wireless Body-area Sensor Networks (WBSN) are a key component of e-Health solutions. Many different physiological parameters can be monitored and collected continuously by wearable wireless sensors with high accuracy, low power consumption and limited cost. In this work we focus on WBSN for real-time biofeedback applications. In this domain the real-time nature of I/O data streams is of critical importance for providing an useful and efficient sensorial feedback for the user while system lifetime should be maximized. Thus, bandwidth, throughput and energy efficiency of the communication protocol must be carefully optimized. The research community is still divided on the choice of the protocol to use (proprietary, ZigBee, Bluetooth). In this article we investigate how ZigBee meets WBSN requirements showing a higher communication efficiency and lower power consumption, with respect to Bluetooth Serial Port Profile, (SPP) based solution.

Application domains of wireless sensor networks are emerging day-by-day, so developers are creating software components at various layers by using platforms such as MANTIS, TinyOS or ZigBee. Since these platforms are quite different in terms of programming paradigm and provided APIs, porting applications between them is difficult and expensive. In this paper, we show techniques that might be used to dramatically ease the porting application code between different software platforms for WSNs.

Showing functional correctness by simulation before implementation, and preserving it by automated code generation, is extremely useful to reduce the development time for an embedded application. This is even more true for wireless sensor networks, since their nodes often provide very rudimentary debugging facilities, and sufficiently large networks for realistic analysis may be expensive to deploy. While this approach, also known as model-based design, is becoming quite standard for several domains that have similar constraints as wireless sensor networks, such as automotive electronics, there is a lack of tools for this purpose in the WSN world. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we present a framework (based on Simulink, Stateflow and Embedded Coder) in which an engineer can create sensor network components (both at the application and at the protocol level) that can be used as building blocks to model, simulate and automatically generate code for different underlying platforms and operating systems.

The paper presents E2RINA, an aggregation algorithm for wireless sensor network applications characterized by clustered topologies, such as building automation and manufacturing plants. Thank to an efficient use of the wireless channel, E2RINA offers the robustness of the gossip-based algorithms and, at the same time, the energy performance of the faster cluster head-based algorithms. A mathematical model to predict the performance of the algorithm with respect to the free variables without the need of extensive simulations was also developed. The model was validated and the robustness of E2RINA by running a simulation model of a test case consisting of a cluster of MICA nodes.