Programming approaches and challenges for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute a new per-vasive and ubiquitous technology. They have been success-fully used in various application areas and in future com-puting environments, WSNs will play an increasingly im-portant role. However, programming sensor networks and applications to be deployed in them is extremely challeng-ing. It has traditionally been an error-prone task since it re-quires programming individual nodes, using low-level pro-gramming issues and interfacing with the hardware and the network. This aspect is currently changing as different high-level programming abstractions and middleware solutions are coming into the arena. Nevertheless, many research challenges are still open. This paper presents a survey of the current state-of-the-art in the field, establishing a clas-sification and highlighting some likely research challenges and future directions. 1