Towards a generic design for general-purpose sensor network nodes

Abstract

The key to mature and efficient industrial software engineering is standardisation more than an aggressive struggle for innovation only for the sake of its own. This is assumption is also held for the area of sensor networks development, which is becoming an increasingly important field at the interface between software and hardware engineering. This short position paper proposes and outlines a generic design for the nodes of such sensor networks, which could be used in the future as the basis of almost any conceivable sensor network application. On such a basis of generic standardisation, the development of specific and particular sensor network applications will then be mainly a matter of hardware-independent programming with APIs, as it is already well known in the classical domain of operating systems in ordinary desktop PCs.