The worldwide spreading of Internet, in combination with the development of new low power and low cost embedded devices, has enabled the so-called Internet of Things vision. Wireless Sensor Networks represent an invaluable resource for realizing such scenario, inside which new and innovative applications could be developed. However, the low availability of resources and the reduced processing capacity of the target embedded platforms make the development of the next-generation applications very challenging. This paper proposes an innovative system architecture, called STarch, able to simplify the development of new applications and protocols for resource-constrained objects. It is meant to follow the software engineering principles and to support a wide range of applications, making both the programming easier and the code portable over multiple hardware platforms. STarch simplifies the network configuration process, through the use of an automatic mechanism based on the XML language and it runs properly on different operating systems, including FreeRTOS and Contiki. The feasibility of the proposed architecture has been proved by using a test bed approach, while an extensive performance analysis have been carried out in order to demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of memory requirements and processing delays.
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