A recent study predicted that in 2020 there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet (seven times the worlds population). These devices are not only smartphone and tablets, but also things which are able to perform various operations, such as sensing data, actuating on the external environment, and so on. With this perspective, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are getting mainstream in a wide variety of applications and systems; possible applications include environment monitoring, energy metering, smart cities, health care and intelligent houses.

A4WSN allows engineers to perform analysis and code generation in earlier stages of the WSN development life cycle. The A4WSN platform can be extended with third-party plugins.

A4WSN

A4WSN is a novel modelling and analysis platform to support an architecture-driven development of WSNs. The platform is called A4WSN and leverages a multi-view architectural approach based on three modeling languages to describe a WSN from different viewpoints: (i) software components and their interactions, (ii) the low-level and hardware specification of sensor nodes, and (iii) the physical environment where sensor nodes are deployed, separately. Model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques and tools are used to realise the modelling framework through metamodelling, model weaving and model transformation. The modeling framework is supported by a programming framework that enables the implementation of analysis and code generation plugins by third party developers; they can be employed to assess and analyse the architectural design decisions and used to generate executable code, respectively.