Why Data Abstraction?
Writing distributed applications for WSNs has traditionally been a complicated affair. Until recently, it was customary to obtain sensor readings by accessing platform-specific registers and to develop the functions needed to process and exchange the obtained data in application specific manner. Such an approach obviously wastes resources and distracts the developer from focusing on the core functionality of his/her application. To remedy the situation, various ways to abstract data present in the sensor networks for easier manipulation and access have been developed. In this section we briefly discuss the data and communication abstraction problem for WSNs in general, and then compare the abstraction offered by the UDAE with other solutions presented in the literature.
