ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on innovative architectures and basic concepts of current software development solutions for wireless sensor networks. The several quality–of–service aspects have to be met by sensor node software, such as latency, processing time for data fusion or compression, or flexibility regarding routing algorithms or medium access control techniques. A middleware for wireless sensor networks should encapsulate required functionality in a layer between operating system and application. This feature is necessary in future wireless sensor networks to adapt the behavior of sensor network dynamically through new injected programs or capsules. The fact changes the software development approach and points out new challenges as they are well known from the distributed systems domain. The sensorWare is a software framework for wireless sensor networks that provides querying, dissemination, and fusion of sensor data as well as coordination of actuators. Main feature is dynamical grouping of nodes depending on environmental changes described by predefined aggregate functions, critical mass, and freshness horizon.
