OpenCL as Wireless Sensor Network programming abstraction

OpenCL is a programming framework for heterogeneous platforms composed of a multitude of processors such as CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs. The advantage of the framework is that a programmer has a unified view of a program and that it shields the programmer from processor specifics and details of communication primitives. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise of a number of (heterogeneous) sensor nodes forwarding data to a sink node. Application processing is distributed across heterogeneous processors located on sensor nodes and the sink. It is desirable to provide WSN application programmers with a unified programming framework and to shield them from the complexity of distributing code on a multitude of processing platforms. It seems that OpenCL's goals are a good match for the outlined WSN programming requirements. In this paper we discuss the feasibility of using OpenCL as programming abstraction for processing intensive WSN applications. As example case we discuss structural health monitoring which requires implementation of a data processing chain across multiple heterogeneous processors