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Wireless sensor networks are characterized by very tight code size and power constraints and by a lack of well-established standard software development platforms such as Posix. In this article, we present a comparative study between a few fairly different such platforms, namely MANTIS, TinyOS, and ZigBee, when considering them from the application developer's perspective, that is, by focusing mostly on functional aspects, rather than on performance or code size. In other words, we compare both the tasking model used by these platforms and the API libraries they offer. Sensor network applications are basically event based, so most of the software platforms are also built on considering event handling mechanism, however some use a more traditional thread based model. In this article, we consider implementations of a simple generic application in MANTIS, TinyOS, and the Ember ZigBee development framework, with the goal of depicting major differences between these platforms, and suggesting a programming style aimed at maximizing portability between them.

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.