Srijan : A Graphical Toolkit for WSN Application Development

Macroprogramming is an application development technique for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the developer specifies the behavior of the system, as opposed to that of the constituent nodes. Although several languages for macroprogramming have been proposed recently, the area of easy-to-use graphical tools for macroprogramming in real environments is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we present Srijan, a toolkit that enables application development for WSNs in a graphical manner using data-driven macroprogramming. It can be used in various stages of application development, viz. i) specification of application as a task graph using a graphical interface, ii) customization of the autogenerated source files with domain-specific imperative code, iii) specification of the target system structure, iv) compilation of the macroprogram into individual customized runtimes for each constituent node of the target system, and finally v) deployment of the auto generated node-level code in an over-the-air manner to the nodes in the target system. The current implementation of Srijan targets the recently released Sun SPOT sensor nodes, and is available for public download. Our experiments show that using toolkit can drastically reduce the time and effort involved in developing real-world WSN applications.