Cloud-Enabled Modeling of Sensor Networks in Educational Settings

Interdisciplinarity is an important challenge for nowadays engineering studies and this can be achieved through systematic integration of concepts and technologies. The chapter presents an approach that gives an inner view on conceiving modeling languages with specific applications to sensor networks, supported by configurable tools enabled by cloud. The system is used by students to model the characteristics of the sensors and the network architecture, but also to introduce their extensions through programs that interpret such models. The modeling environment uses Windows as a host operating system and is deployed in a customizable Infrastructure as a Service cloud, based on IBM Service Delivery Manager. For achieving an easily deployable educational solution, a virtual machine is associated with each student who works to accomplish a task for a given laboratory class, or during the entire semester. The provisioning process and experimental results for several test scenarios are also described.