中文摘要：

无线传感器网络作为一种新兴的技术,受到了学术界和工业界的广泛关注.然而随着传感器网络及其应用的发展,系统的复杂性也随之增加,与传统网络相比无限传感器网络又具有其独特的特征,使得无线传感器网络的程序开发变得更加困难.中间件提供了一个编程抽象,方便了应用程序的开发,缩减了应用程序和底层设备的间隙.针对无线传感器网络的特点,分析了无线传感器网络中间件设计面临的问题,对有关设计方法进行了分类评述,并对几种典型中间件进行了比较,最后从通信范式、QoS支持和安全等方面提出了一些改进思路.

英文摘要：

As a new technology, wireless sensor networks attract considerable attention of academic researchers and people from industry. As the wireless sensor network nodes are usually smaller, and cheaper, and the networks and yet powerful and robust, they can be deployed in large number of applications ranging from habitat monitoring, medical applications, industrial automation to mission critical military applications. However, with the development of sensor networks and sensor network applications, the overall complexity of such systems is continuously increasing. Additionally, compared with traditional networks, wireless sensor networks have some unique characteristics. All of these make programming sensor networks non-trivial. Middleware supports programming abstract which facilitate the programmer task and bridge the gap between the application and the hardware. The characteristics of wireless sensor networks are described, and the problems which the development and design of wireless sensor network middleware layers must address are discussed. Then concrete middleware approaches are presented and discussed according to the programming paradigms used by them, and several classic approaches are compared by concentrating on how well they meet some criteria. Finally, some improvement directions are presented at several aspects of middleware design, such as communication paradigms, QoS support, security management, data processing, etc. The open research issues in this field are also pointed out.