Keynote - Software Engineering and Wireless Sensor Networks: Happy Marriage or Consensual Divorce?

Gian Pietro Picco (University of Trento, Italy)

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), software plays a fundamental role. Unlike conventional distributed systems, where the application layer is built atop a largely immutable, application-agnostic network stack, in WSN the latter is i) entirely realized in software, therefore malleable and ii) expected to be tailored to the needs of the application. Application and network support must therefore be co-designed, to satisfy the end-user needs. To complicate matters, the latter include not only functional requirements, but also stringent non-functional requirements about lifetime, reliability, and data yield.

Today, this complex development chore is usually tackled by a code-and-fix development process that relies solely on the (rather primitive) constructs provided by the operating system and the skills of developers. WSN deployments are often approached as short-lived experiments yielding just enough results to demonstrate the feasibility of a technique, rather than as reliable components of long-lived, operational systems. For WSNs to emerge from research labs and become truly useful in the real world, there is an obvious need for methodologies, techniques, and abstractions that i) improve the development process, e.g., by simplifying programming, fostering reuse across deployments, and ease maintenance ii) improve the designer's confidence about the correctness, reliability, and performance of the WSN implementation, and iii) are not developed in abstract, rather are grounded in the concrete requirements of real-world applications, e.g., concerning lifetime, robustness, and resource utilization.

How to achieve these goals? An obvious consideration is that a lot of the aforementioned challenges are germane to the techniques and expertise matured by software engineering (SE). Nevertheless, the WSN and SE research communities have been, with few exceptions, by and large impermeable to each other. In this talk we elaborate on this state of affairs, by arguing that a principled approach to development is inevitable as WSN become more and more pervasive, and by identifying and discussing specific areas where a synergy between the SE and WSN communities could provide immediate, much-needed results.

Biography

Gian Pietro Picco is an Associate Professor in the Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienza dell'Informazione (DISI) at University of Trento, Italy. Previously, he has been on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA (1998-1999) and Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1999-2006). The goal of his current research is to ease the development of modern distributed systems through the design and implementation of appropriate programming abstractions and of communication protocols efficiently supporting them. His work spans the research fields of software engineering, middleware, and networking, and is oriented in particular towards wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and large-scale distributed systems. Gian Pietro has been involved in a number of national and international projects on these topics. In 2007, he was the recipient of the "Most Influential Paper from ICSE'97" Award. He is also the recipient of a Best Demo Award at SenSys'07 and of a Best Paper Award at IPSN'09.

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