Software Adaptation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

We present design concepts, programming constructs, and automatic verification techniques to support the development of adaptive Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) software. WSNs operate at the interface between the physical world and the computing machine, and are hence exposed to unpredictable environment dynamics. WSN software must adapt to these dynamics to maintain dependable and efficient operation. However, developers are left without proper support to develop adaptive functionality in WSN software. Our work fills this gap with three key contributions: i) design concepts help developers organize the necessary adaptive functionality and understand their relations, ii) dedicated programming constructs simplify the implementations, iii) custom verification techniques allow developers to check the correctness of their design before deployment. We implement dedicated tool support to tie the three contributions, facilitating their practical application. Our evaluation considers representative WSN applications to analyze code metrics, synthetic simulations, and cycle-accurate emulation of popular WSN platforms. The results indicate that our work is effective in simplifying the development of adaptive WSN software; for example, implementations are provably easier to test and to maintain, the run-time overhead of our dedicated programming constructs is negligible, and our verification techniques return results in a matter of seconds.

IoTSim-Osmosis: A framework for modeling and simulating IoT applications over an edge-cloud continuum

“…ConesC [30] is a verification WSN tool designed to easily deploy and test different types of WSN models in terms of design perspectives. It efficiently allows developers to check and evaluate the correctness of proposed WSN designs.…”

Integrating Software Engineering Processes in the Development of Efficient Intrusion Detection Systems in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The urge of applying SE processes is of vital importance especially to large, complex systems including networking and security service systems [3][4][5][6]. Such systems are associated with risks that increase in unattended environments such as wireless networks.…”

“…Such systems are associated with risks that increase in unattended environments such as wireless networks. Therefore, embracing a holistic approach of any weakness along the engineering process of the system is required [1][2][3][4][5][6] to secure the networks from vulnerabilities that may lead to future security breaches.…”

“…WSN security has drawn the attention of many researchers [7,[9][10][11]. To address and overcome the security issue which is considered one of the main challenges in WSNs, many security solutions were developed including software-based network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) [3,6,9,12]. IDSs are classified according to different properties [9,16].…”

“…Therefore, these systems are deployed on different applications and environments. Accordingly, they have different SE requirements, designs, architectures, and implementation methods [1][2][3][4]22,23]. Consequently, developing a secure IDS while considering the energy resource is important.…”