Wireless Image Sensor Network Application Platform (WiSNAP)

WiSNAP attempts to provide a MATLAB TM framework for researching, developing, ...

Wireless sensor networks offer an entire new field open for research and development. These types of networks conceptually offer many exciting features including scalability, self-configuration, self-healing, multicast routing, and easy deployment. For these reasons, they are well suited for a wide range of applications in monitoring, control, surveillance, and distributed sensing among many others. In particular, image sensor-based wireless networks are deemed advantageous for many of these applications. However, specific applications still need to be defined, and their implementation requires further work.
The availability of suitable tools can greatly aid investigation and development of applications for wireless sensor networks. For this purpose, MatlabTM may serve as one appropriate rapid-prototyping tool. Its high-level programming environment would allow easy design, implementation, and emulation of algorithms and applications for wireless image sensor networks if interfaces to wireless motes and image sensors exist. Such interfaces could be realized as standardized libraries, which provide easy-to-use functions to communicate with a variety of image sensors and wireless motes. The use of such libraries disburdens its potential user from having to deal with mote- or sensor-specific interface details. A set of such standardized libraries would form a MatlabTM framework for wireless image sensor networks, in which algorithms and applications can be developed in an efficient manner.
For these reasons, the Wireless Image Sensor Network Application Platform (WiSNAP) attempts to provide a MatlabTM framework for researching, developing, and investigating applications and algorithms for wireless image sensor network. In particular, WiSNAP consists of two Application Program Interfaces (APIs): an Image Sensor API and a Wireless Mote API. These APIs provide the user with simple, easy-to-use functions for interfacing with image sensors and wireless motes, respectively. Thus, there is no need to deal with hardware- and device-specific details. These are taken care of by underlying device libraries that implement the necessary hardware-specific communications and functions.
The APIs and libraries are written to facilitate easy extension to other image sensors and wireless motes or to include some device-specific functionality. At this point, WiSNAP does by no means represent a complete or exhaustive implementation of available image sensors or wireless mote. It rather intends to establish a development structure that can be easily extended by other developers based on their particular application needs.