Visual Programming and Scripting Languages:PROVIZ framework will include two simplified development environments (languages) to program wireless sensors. The first one is a visual programming language where scientists and researchers will use visual blocks and certain shapes as programming constructs and the other one is a scripting language, which is a domain specific simplified language with simple commands to ease programming tasks. These simplified languages will allow researchers in other disciplines to easily program the sensors and focus more on the tasks in their domains rather than on the overhead of learning how to program sensors and the details of the underlying sensor software architecture (i.e., TinyOS, nesC). Hence, PROVIZ can expedite the development of programs for sensors and, therefore, give the scientists and engineers from other disciplines more time to make stronger research contributions. |
Simulator Integration:PROVIZ framework will include a capability to connect to external network simulators (e.g., OMNeT). Specifically, it will be able to visualize data trace generated by a wireless sensor network deployment in an external simulation environment. Further, it will be able to generate the code that can run in the simulator. In this way, simulators popularly used by computer engineers and scientists will also be accessible to researchers and engineers of other fields (e.g., civil engineers, geophysicists) and PROVIZ will be able to alleviate the complexity associated with programming basic scenarios in network simulators. |
Visual Demos:PROVIZ will include built-in extensible visual demo deployment scenarios, which enables one to easily visualize pre-defined sensor scenarios. Researchers can use this feature to create a demo scenario to visualize a critical/complex wireless sensor deployment and share it with other PROVIZ users. In addition to default scenarios, the demo visualization scenarios can be extended or customized by users with an XML file, in which users will be able to specify the sensor type to be used, number of sensors, and other details. These easy-to-run demonstrations would be also instrumental in pedagogical contexts. For instance, undergraduate, graduate and even students in K-12 will have an opportunity to learn to use different sensors and appreciate their use in science and engineering fields. |