Wireless Sensor Networks and mHealth basics 3.

Last theory on Wireless Sensor Networks coming up. What about the software, middleware and programming languages?

Software

Energy is the scarcest resource of WSN nodes, and it determines the lifetime of WSNs. WSNs are meant to be deployed in large numbers in various environments, including remote and hostile regions, with ad-hoc communications as key. For this reason, algorithms and protocols need to address the following issues:

• Lifetime maximization
• Robustness and fault tolerance
• Self-configuration

Middleware

There is considerable research effort currently invested in the design of middleware for WSN’s. In general approaches can be classified into distributed database, mobile agents, and event-based.

Programming languages

Programming the sensor nodes is difficult when compared with normal computer systems. The resource constrained nature of these nodes gives rise to new programming models although most nodes are currently programmed in C.

• c@t (Computation at a point in space (@) Time)
• DCL (Distributed Compositional Language)
• galsC
• LabVIEW
• nesC
• Protothreads
• SNACK
• SNAPpy (Python)
• SQTL
• Java Sun SPOT
• uSWN