In the last decade, wireless sensor networking has been one of the most popular research areas for computer engineers and scientists. The use of wireless sensors has also started to gain popularity among researchers other than computer engineers and scientists. Today, sensors are used to enable civil engineers to monitor the structural health of deteriorating infrastructure such as highways and bridges, farmers to develop precision-agriculture techniques, ecologists to observe wildlife in their natural habitat, geophysicists to capture seismic activity of volcanoes, and in many other application areas. However, the task of developing software applications for wireless sensors is challenging for researchers because sensors have limited technical capabilities and software implementations for sensors require meticulous procedures to provide a desired level of services (e.g., reliability, security) for applications. This situation is even further exacerbated for researchers in other fields of engineering and science (e.g., civil engineers and geophysicists) as they may not have a rigorous programming background. Therefore, to facilitate the design, development and implementation of wireless sensor applications, this project provides a new framework called PROVIZ, which integrates visualization and programming functionalities into a common platform. PROVIZ is an open-source, platform independent, modular, and extensible framework for heterogeneous wireless sensor monitoring and application development. It consists of a set of easy-to-use simplified languages (one domain specific scripting language, one icon-based drag-and-drop style visual language) and a simple programming editor for developing wireless sensor applications and a mechanism for (re)programming wireless sensor nodes remotely over-the-air by distributing the generated application image. PROVIZ has the capability to visualize wireless sensor data captured from (1) a packet sniffer, (2) a binary packet trace file (e.g., PSD format), and (3) an external simulator running a wireless sensor application. PROVIZ also has the capability to process data from multiple sniffers simultaneously to visualize a large wireless sensor deployment.
PROVIZ will be instrumental to scientists and engineers working with wireless sensors in many disciplines (e.g., civil engineering, ecology, agriculture). PROVIZ will allow these researchers to easily program sensors and to focus more on the tasks in their domains by significantly reducing the overhead of learning how to program sensors. The PROVIZ project will be conducted as an open source project, enabling interested software developers to benefit from and add to it. Further, a variation of PROVIZ will be used to present sensor networking concepts to middle school underrepresented minority students in Georgia. Given the proliferation of wireless sensor utilization in various engineering and science fields, it is envisioned that the success of the PROVIZ project will help contribute to the growth of the future cyber workforce in the U.S.
