Eating of the pudding: supporting the development of life-cycle of wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring scientists and ecologists

In this thesis we present design and tooling solutions as well as network protocols to support application experts in the entire development life-cycle of wireless sensor networks. The complete life-cycle of wireless sensor networks starts with the user/application requirement analysis. It then goes through the following steps: hardware schematic design, PCB design, system software design, network protocol design, application software design, testing, debugging, and re-programming. In addition to being error-prone and time consuming tasks, all these steps require expertise, experience, in-depth knowledge about electronics and computer science, which application experts often do not posses. Instead of large quantities of WSN platforms with perfect design, application experts often require limited number of custom-designed wireless sensor node platforms, often not commercially available, for fast prototyping. They are interested in platforms that can be easily used and experimented with and can easily be adapted into their/applications requirements to find the best and most appropriate setup (software and hardware wise). As such availability of accurate and easy-to-use support tools, which can be used by application experts to translate their requirements easily and efficiently into a hardware schematic and associated software code and to make the entire process of hardware and software design easier, faster, and more efficient would greatly help bridge the gap between the demands of application experts and their WSN’s expertise and knowledge. The main focus of this thesis is on providing tools and mechanisms for ap- plication experts in general, and environmental and ecological scientists in par- ticular, to support the entire life-cycle of wireless sensor nodes, facilitating and accelerating the process. To this end, the main research question addressed in this thesis is: Can the entire process of design and development of wireless sensor networks be made efficient, easy, fast, less error-prone and open to ap- plication experts in the field of environmental monitoring and ecology who have no a priori knowledge about WSNs?