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Diploma thesis

 

Software Factories for Embedded Systems
Design and Implementation of a Visual Domain Specific Language
for Wireless Sensor Networks
Benjamin Schröter

Supervisors

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jochen Schiller
Dipl.-Inform. Tomasz Naumowicz
(Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Informatik, AG Technische Informatik)

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) will be used in more and more areas besides the research in computer science. As a consequence non computer science experts use wireless sensor networks as tools. For the creation of software for such sensor nodes special knowledge is needed since these embedded systems are programmed with C. The discussion with users leaded to the basic requirements to create a model driven development environment (a software factory). This IDE should enable non computer scientists to develop software for WSNs.

As a part of this thesis three domain specific languages (DSLs) were designed and implemented to model all aspects of a sensor node application. These languages with some additional tools form the model driven Software Factory Flow. The Software Factory enables users to develop programs for sensor nodes in a graphical manner and generate source code. This code can be executed on sensor nodes of the given platform without any further manual work. All languages and tools are independent of the concrete platform. Hardware vendors can create new Flow compatible platforms for different sensor node hardware.

In addition with these languages an interface to an (embedded) PC can be defined. From the interface specification some code for the sensor nodes and a library for a PC will be generated. The library provides an easy access to the sensor network without the need of implementing low level communication protocols.

A Flow compatible reference platform for the ScatterWeb MSB-430H sensor nodes was created, too. Based on that platform some example programs and a more complex case study were created.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Model Driven Software Development
  3. Tools and Platforms
  4. Requirements Analysis
  5. Design of the Domain Specific Languages
  6. Software Architecture
  7. Applications and Case Study
  8. Summary and Perspective
  • Appendix

Download

Diplomarbeit Benjamin Schröter.pdf (only in German)