The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71

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The Journal of Systems and Software

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jss

Modeling and automatic code generation for wireless sensor network

applications using model-driven or business process approaches: A
systematic mapping study
Sergio Teixeira a,d,e,∗, Bruno Alves Agrizzi a, José Gonçalves Pereira Filho a, Silvana Rossetto b,
Roquemar de Lima Baldam a,c
a
Departamento de Informática, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória, ES, Brasil
b
Departamento de Ciência da Computação, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil
c
Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo (IFES), Vitória, ES, Brasil
d
Universidade Católica de Brasília (UCB), Brasília, DF, Brasil
e
Centro Universitário Católico de Vitória (UCV), Vitória, ES, Brasil

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This systematic mapping study investigates the modeling and automatic code generation initiatives for
Received 25 December 2016 wireless sensor network applications based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, trying to understand the rea-
Revised 14 June 2017
sons, characteristics and methods used in the approaches available in the scientific literature, identifying
Accepted 15 June 2017
research gaps and potential approaches that can be better exploited, indicating new possibilities of re-
Available online 19 June 2017
search. The focus is on studies that follow the Model-Driven or Business Process approaches.
Keywords: © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Systematic mapping study
Wireless sensor networks
Model-driven development
Business process

1. Introduction tiny nodes with processing, storage, communication and sensing

The Internet of Things (IoT) (Haller et al., 2009; Ruppen et al.,
2015) is a new concept of Internet featuring the vision of a global
network of smart objects interconnected and accessible by the use
and adaptation of protocols and well-defined communication stan-
dards of the current Internet. In the scenario of the Future Internet,
objects from the concrete world are embedded with processing,
storage, wireless communication and sensing capabilities in a ubiq-
uitous and integrated way to create IoT applications. This integra-
tion allows these objects to be seen by other Internet applications
or by the business process as autonomous entities with proactive
behavior, knowledge of the surrounding environment, and the abil-
ity to communicate and collaborate with each other as well as with
users and systems.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) (Akyildiz et al., 2002; Loureiro
et al., 2003; Souza, 2013; Yick et al., 2008) are important compo-
nents of the IoT universe. They provide essential tools in the phys-
ical world magnitudes monitoring. WSN are structures formed by
∗
Corresponding author at: Departamento de Informática, Universidade Federal do
Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória, ES, Brasil.
E-mail address: sergio@multicast.com.br (S. Teixeira).
capacities that allow their users to interact and observe in detail,
capillarity and precision, the most varied environments, important
component of monitoring and control solutions in areas these net-
works huge potential for applications in many areas and fields of
IoT, allowing them to present themselves as an various scenarios.
For example, in Smart City (Su et al., 2011) scenarios, WSN can be
used in the implementation of observation services and control as-
pects of daily city life, such as surveillance of public spaces, build-
ings and other civilian structures, monitoring of rivers, streams and
urban forests, monitoring of disaster risk areas, support to urban
mobility, tracking and tracing of loads and objects.
Companies and business corporations realized that the addi-
tional processing capabilities offered by smart devices located in
the network edges can be conveniently used to their benefit, trans-
ferring to these devices the responsibility for implementing part of
their business process logic. Given the huge population of devices,
it seems appropriate to explicitly promote scalability and foster
business process performance. As discussed in Ruppen and Meyer
(2013), this population of smart devices forms a new distributed
digital work force, hosting a wide range of new services for obser-
vation, measurement and collection of information from the sur-
rounding environment. This enables a much closer, more sophisti-

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2017.06.024
0164-1212/© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
cated and more complete monitoring of entities in the real world,
with potential benefits for innovative applications to support or-
ganizations and their business processes. Furthermore, the avail-
ability of a larger volume of data on the entities of interest result
from interactions with the physical world and their readiness for
the level of business processes in near real-time, can help compa-
nies define new business strategies, such as differentiated plans for
perishables sales, or even guide dynamic process reconfiguration
to achieve faster reactions to observed changes in the real world,
leading to more competitive business.
Building IoT real-world applications, however, can be a chal-
lenge, even for experienced developers, because it requires low-
level programming skills related to the sensors’ hardware platform
and operating system abstractions, together with a deep under-
standing of the application domain and the business model re-
quirements, and the high-level rules that may affect the applica-
tion behavior in an environment with resource-constrained hard-
ware devices.
One major challenge is to design solutions that simplify the ap-
plication development process, taking into consideration the par-
ticipation of the different stakeholders involved. In general, IoT ap-
plications are designed to resolve a specific domain problem with
well-defined rules, events and functionalities. Therefore, develop-
ers must provide the mapping of high-level requirements of the
specific problem to low-level programming in a specific or suit-
able hardware platform. This fact creates a high coupling degree
between the business logic and the sensor hardware platform, re-
sulting in little flexibility and great difficulty in maintenance pro-
cesses due to the large platform dependence.
The above scenario brings up two important issues: (i) appli-
cation developers have to deal with many aspects of the develop-
ment process at different abstraction levels; (ii) the participation
and interaction of the domain expert is relatively low in the entire
process, especially due to the high learning curve of the program-
ming languages and platform operating systems.
One strategy to address the two issues above is to promote
the separation of concerns as it is known in software engineering,
i.e. a design method to address only a limited set of concerns in
each of a series of design steps. Particularly, in this case, we are
considering two views: first, the concerns related to the low-level
programming details, configurations, communication protocols and
environmental sensing; second, the concerns related to the high-
level rules and business logic, together with the domain sensing
events and how to specify them.
This separation of concerns helps to clearly contrast and specify
the roles and performed activities between the domain expert and
the WSN expert (low-level programmer), which could improve the
domain expert participation and interactivity in the design and ap-
plication process development. In this approach, experienced pro-
grammers would act in the treatment of sensing aspects, consider-
ing the hardware platform architecture of the node and the com-
munication protocols. The definition of rules and events of the ap-
plication domain would be dealt with by domain expert who has
a much more specialized knowledge of business rules logic. Of
course, it is essential that the rules be easily described and under-
stood by the domain expert. The language used for rule descrip-
tion should have the flexibility to change and build new rules and
events, since these domain features are generally dynamic.
Various efforts in this direction have been made over the
years (Doddapaneni et al., 2012; Jan et al., 2012; Nguyen et al.,
2016). Particularly in the last few years, it is possible to see an
increasing interest in the use of high-level modeling languages
and approaches, such as Business Process Modeling and Notation
(BPMN) and Model-driven Design Development (MDD), to address
the modeling and the code generation process for WSN/IoT appli-
51
cations (Berardinelli et al., 2014; Rodrigues et al., 2015a, 2015b;
Schwalb et al., 2012).
Despite the existence of several studies proposing to simplify
the modeling and code generation process for WSN/IoT appli-
cations, and regardless of the use of Model-Driven or BPM ap-
proaches, recent research has shown that some issues have proven
very relevant to many IoT scenarios which directly influence the
way an approach explores the best manner to address methods,
mechanisms and techniques to simplify the entire code genera-
tion process (Akbal-Delibas et al., 2009; Caracas, 2012; Rodrigues
et al., 2015b; Ruppen and Meyer, 2013; Tranquillini et al., 2012).
Among these issues it is possible to identify some relevant con-
cerns: (i) whether or not it exploits high-level requirements such
as context-awareness or quality of service (QoS); (ii) the way the
approach is concerned with saving energy; (iii) whether or not it
uses some kind of middleware support; (iv) whether or not it per-
forms some type of service orientation or cloud strategies in the
process; (v) whether or not it addresses some form of code updat-
ing and not just the code generation for the first deployment so-
lution. Furthermore, since the modeling and code generation pro-
cess can be very complex in some real-world IoT scenarios, it may
require the engagement of multidisciplinary development teams.
Consequently, this may result in several stakeholders with differ-
ent interests and skill levels working together during the develop-
ment process. Therefore, the roles should be defined according to
real-world professional profiles in order to increase the chances of
the success of the project.
Considering the vast spectrum of potential IoT applications and
domains, it is central to investigate in which extension the whole
or a subset of these issues are taken into consideration at de-
sign level and actually implemented by current modeling and code
generation approaches focused on IoT development. This paper
reviews modeling and automatic code generation initiatives for
WSN-based IoT applications grounded on the IEEE 802.15.4 stan-
dard (IEEE Computer Society, 2011) trying to understand their main
characteristics, design choices, identifying research gaps, and indi-
cating new possibilities of research. The focus is on studies that
follow the Model-Driven or Business Process approaches. The IEEE
802.5.14 (Gutierrez et al., 2001; IEC, 2014) was chosen for being the
most relevant WSN communication standard today for short-range
transmission with low cost, complexity and low energy consump-
tion. All the studies investigated in this systematic mapping use
this standard in their physical and data link layers.
There are many other regional or market specific standards that
are based on the IEEE 802.15.4, such as ZigBee® (Jindal, V., Verma,
2016), WirelessHART (Chen et al., 2014), WIA-PA (Wang et al.,
2011) and ISA.100.11a (Azad, S., Srinivasan, 2016). Various revisions
have been made since the initial standard was published in 2003.
Several amendments were added in 2006 and 2011 that cover ad-
ditional physical layer protocols, regional frequency bands and spe-
cific application areas (IEEE Computer Society, 2012). For example,
it can now be used at 80 0/90 0 MHz and 2.4 GHz and with ultralow
power operation and in specific applications like train control or
health/medical monitoring.
This paper uses the Systematic Mapping Study method to pro-
vide a wide overview of this research area, finding and show-
ing evidence within a topic of interest, and using well-defined
methodology to identify, analyze and interpret all available evi-
dence related to the specific research questions in an unbiased
way. This research was based on the follow five research questions:
(i) Which high-level aspects are treated by the modeling or code
generation process?; (ii) Which strategies are used for controlling
or reducing the node energy consumption?; (iii) Is there any type
of middleware supporting the modeling or code generation pro-
cess?; (iv) Does the approach for modeling and code generation
apply some sort of service-orientation in their conceptual architec-
52 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
ture or deployment process?; (v) Does the approach allow any type
of dynamic code update after the code generation process?
The objective of this mapping is to investigate studies that pro-
pose a method to simplify the modeling and code generation pro-
cess for WSN-based IoT solutions. With the results of such a sys-
tematic mapping, it is possible to identify and show gaps or topics
that are suitable for conducting a Systematic Literature Review or
further research study.
A systematic mapping provides a broader view of a topic and
acts as a pointer, indicating gaps and opportunities for new re-
search. On the other hand, a systematic review, implies a more in-
depth study of the research questions of a particular topic (Souza
et al., 2015). Systematic mapping search terms that are broader or
less highly focused and may return large numbers of papers. This
is appropriate when broad coverage is required rather than nar-
row focus that the systematic study provides. The protocol used in
this work, i.e., the plan that describes the conduct of the proposed
review, is available as a spreadsheet and contains all the results
from each stage, including the graphics produced and used in this
review (Teixeira et al., 2016).
The remainder of this paper is organized in the following way.
Section 2 presents a brief overview of background concepts re-
lated to the modeling and automatic code generation initiatives
for WSN/IoT, as well as relevant concepts related to the research
questions and correlated mapping research. Section 3 discusses
and presents the research method applied to perform this map-
ping study, including their implications and limitations. Section
4 presents the results and discussion. Finally, Section 5 completes
the paper, presenting closing notes and pointing out future re-
search works.
2. Background
This section presents the main concepts related to the research
questions and topics addressed in this systematic mapping study.
2.1. MDE-based approaches
Real-world enterprise systems coexist in an environment that
is characterized by the constant rise of new demands and applica-
tion requirements. The increasing complexity, the wide variety of
systems and technologies with different types of clients, including
desktops, thin clients, mobile, and web clients, requires software
development approaches that are able to reduce the maintenance
costs, improve the quality and longevity of systems and facilitate
the work of development teams to reuse parts already developed
to generate new things.
Model-driven approaches are appropriate alternatives to ad-
dress the challenges of the enterprise system development pro-
cess. They offer suitable architectures and methods which simplify
the task of integrating software and heterogeneous technologies
that need to interoperate with quality, speed and effectiveness. The
model-driven design process adopts incremental and interactive
development of distributed applications from abstract representa-
tions using a framework to generate an executable model (Almeida,
2006). The process is grounded on model transformations, which
means that it requires mapping between models to produce a tar-
get model from a source model, combined with transformation
rules.
A model can be defined as a set of elements to describe any
physical, abstract or hypothetical reality. A model addresses only
the relevant characteristics from a particular point of view, and ig-
nore or suppress those that are irrelevant. For example, a model-
driven stepwise design process with different abstraction levels
should define all the modeling activities performed according to
the user requirements and the modeling methodology to produce
a target model from an input model.
The model-driven approach was first adopted by Object Man-
agement Group (OMG) in 20 01 (Mellor et al., 20 04). The three pri-
mary goals stated were portability, interoperability and reusability,
driven through the separation of concerns. This means that only a
limited set of design concerns are addressed in each of a series of
design steps, according to the stepwise design.
There are a lot of concepts, principles, architectures, standards,
structures and methodologies related to the model-driven ap-
proaches. In order to clarify and standardize the terms that are
used in this systematic mapping, it is important to characterize the
most commonly used ones. The Model-driven Design Development
(MDD) is a programming paradigm that uses a symbolic represen-
tation of a project through an unambiguous, concise and complete
language.
The Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is an approach and an ar-
chitectural framework for software development using models in
an MDD paradigm. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a broader
concept than that of MDD and MDA. MDE is an approach that
uses different levels of abstraction in an MDD paradigm to trans-
form high-level models to low-level models until reaching the exe-
cutable model. This mapping study uses the term MDE to identify
and characterize an MDE-based approach.
The design process uses a modeling language to transform de-
sign concepts into rules and symbolic artefacts. Unified Model-
ing Language (UML)(Object Management Group (OMG), 2002), the
well-known general modeling language used to specify, visualize,
and document models of software artefacts, is the most commonly
OMG modeling language adopted by MDE approaches.
According to the OMG (Truyen, 2006), there are three standard
models in MDD: Computation Independent Model (CIM), Platform In-
dependent Model (PIM) and Platform Specific Model (PSM). The CIM,
which can also be called a business model or a domain model,
provides a way to characterize business or domain specific char-
acteristics without any concern or specification of a computable
model (Object Management Group (OMG), 2014). The “instances”
of the CIM are “real things”, not representations of those things in
an information system. The PIM characterize the application func-
tionality, regardless of the platform, in order to enable mapping to
one or more platforms. The PSM combines the specifications with
additional details necessary to characterize specific aspects of the
target platform in which the application will run.
In a WSN application scenario, it is possible for domain ex-
perts to model, through the CIM, the features and characteristics
of a WSN application without worrying about the computing as-
pects. At the level of PIM modeling, it is not the designer task
to worry about the platform in which the sensor code will run.
PSM modeling deals with the specificities of each platform, gen-
erating a PSM for each one. For example, a PIM models the WSN
application regardless of hardware platform (SUNSpot (“Sun SPOT
World,” 2016), MicaZ (MEMSIC, 2016), TelosB (MEMSIC, 2016)), and
the PSM deals with models for specific platform and operating sys-
tem (e.g. TinyOS (“TinyOS,” 2016) and Contiki (“Contiki,” 2016)).
One of the pioneer MDE approaches for the WSN code gener-
ation was proposed by Losilla et al. (2007). They defined a WSN
domain-specific language to build models with functional and
non-functional requirements. They also specified a nesC1 meta-
model and a modeling tool for creating new nesC component-
based models, which automatically generates nesC codes for the
TinyOS (“TinyOS,” 2016) platform. Akbal-Delibas et al. (2009) pro-
posed Baobab, a framework for semi-automatic code generation.
1
nesC (“TinyOS,” 2016) is a component-based, event-driven programming lan-
guage used to build applications for the TinyOS.
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
The application scenario generates codes for TinyOS for use in the
food industry. As an evolution of Losilla’s approach, Rodrigues et al.
(2015b) proposed ArchWiSeN, a MDA framework to generate WSN
codes for TinyOS and SUNSpot (“Sun SPOT World,” 2016) platforms.
The approach provides different developer viewpoints in order to
involve the network expert, who is the WSN specialist. The domain
expert is involved in the development process by using UML.
Thanks to its characteristics, model-driven approach appears
to be suitable for developing WSN applications from high-level
abstraction to low-level code generation for different platforms
through model transformations. Some important benefits of using
this approach to address sensor node code generation for WSN-
based solutions include: flexibility to change the PIM or create
new PSMs to adapt it to new demands; multiple abstractions level,
which enable different stakeholders with different levels of knowl-
edge to participate in the development process; and suitability to
the enterprise environment, making it possible to generate sensor
node codes without worrying about the platform level details.
2.2. BPM-based approaches
Any organization, large or small, is an autonomous system
in which entities (suppliers, customers, employees, products/ ser-
vices) coexist and interact and basic functions are geared to the or-
ganization’s business (production, marketing, sales, accounting and
finance, human resources, etc). Each of these business functions in-
volves multiple procedures that enable a particular desired result.
In this corporative environment, a Business Process (BP) (Baldam
et al., 2014) has been defined as a set of linked activities and tasks
that find their end in the delivery of a service or product to a
client. Once completed, a BP accomplishes an organizational goal.
A BP describes which activities are performed in the course of a
process, which organizational units participate in process execu-
tion, what input and output data are used, what IT systems are
involved, and which events and risks occur during the process ex-
ecution. In other words, a BP is a set of related actions together
in a logical and consistent manner in order to promote a favorable
output for the organization, both internally and externally, regard-
less of the type or size of the corporation.
Since its conception, progress in the BP area has led to the
development of various business management systems, which, in
turn, have created an industry for Business Process Management
(BPM) software, which seeks to automate process management by
connecting various process actors via technology. In fact, the BP
can be considered one of the most important assets of a company,
because a good characterization of a Business Model (BM) requires
an effective and well-documented business process. In this way,
the Business Process Management, in the enterprise environment,
is adopted as a methodology and suitable approach for modeling
and executing BP according to the BM, and a fast way to respond
to the constant changes in BP. BPM identifies designs, executes,
measures, monitors and improves the BP in order to achieve pos-
itive results according to the strategic planning of an organization
(Baldam et al., 2014).
The representation of business processes is done through a
specific graphic notation, usually incorporated into a modeling
tool. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a OMG
graphic notation standard, which has a well-defined structure
and templates for deploying model concepts in an effective way
((OMG), 2015). BPMN was first proposed in 2004 with the aim of
allowing simple, flexible and consistent BP modeling that can be
performed by non-expert IT professionals. The main goal of BPMN
is to provide a standard notation that is readily understandable
by all business stakeholders. These business stakeholders include
business analysts, who create and refine processes; technical devel-
53
opers responsible for implementing processes; and business man-
agers who monitor and manage the processes.
BPMN uses a graphic language structured through a set of stan-
dard symbols to represent the processes with diagrams. BPMN
intuitive graphics help both technical and non-technical users in
the documentation of the processes at different levels of de-
tail. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between
the graphic notation and the underlying constructs of execution
languages, particularly the Business Process Execution Language
(BPEL) (Glombitza et al., 2011).
Within the last couple of years, IoT has slowly started to pene-
trate other markets as well as businesses and organizations have
started contemplating the value that combining IoT within BPM
programs could bring to an organization. This integration brings
analytics, social and mobile capabilities into current processes and
applications which can lead to the desired agility with regard to
critical business decisions. According to Caracas (2012) and Casati
et al. (2012) the merge of technologies can help organizations to
support evolving business requirements with robust process mod-
eling tools, standards, and best practices. We can also list other
benefits of merging IoT and BPM (Meyer et al., 2013, 2011; Project,
2015; Sungur et al., 2013): (i) faster access to information from any
device or environment with a people-centric and customer-centric
focus; (ii) improved consumer feedback that lead to better process
lifecycles, from design and deployment to analysis and governance;
and (iii) accelerated solution deployment, streamlined operations,
and continuous process improvements.
One of the major current debates is whether or not BPMN fits
the IoT modeling requirements. BPM professionals have to be able
to integrate IoT with BP, adding value to the BM, and aligning the
use of IoT with day-to-day processes and strategic business objec-
tives. This issue is discussed by some of the studies in this sys-
tematic mapping study. For example, Meyer et al. (2013) analyzes
the adequacy of BPMN for use in IoT domain. It is claimed that
an extension of BPMN is needed in order to be more suitable for
modeling BP with IoT. Similarly, the makeSense project (Project,
2015; Sungur et al., 2013) proposed a framework that uses a high-
level language called BPMN4WSN to model WSN applications. New
types of BPMN elements were proposed in the BPMN4WSN meta-
model in order to offer a more suitable notation to describe the
WSN application requirements.
2.3. Other background aspects related to the research questions
In this section, some important concepts will be presented to
support and better characterize the objectives and rationale of the
research questions.
2.3.1. High-level modeling aspects
The ability to model high-level aspects is a relevant issue that
affects the whole code generation process. By high-level aspects,
we mean features including, but not limited to, context-awareness,
Quality of Service (QoS) or Semantics. Stakeholders with little or
no low-level knowledge of a platform can benefit from code gen-
eration approaches that allow for the specification of high-level as-
pects. This can permit them to specify which aspects are relevant
and can be considered as new requirements or demands in some
real-world IoT application scenarios.
The relevance of supporting context-awareness was highlighted
by some of the selected papers in this review. For example, Rosales
et al. (2010) proposed an architecture for a cold chain logistics sce-
nario and showed the importance of using context sensing data in
the logistic process to improve the quality of yoghurt. Domingos
et al. (2010) proposed the integration of IoT and BP in a supply
chain management scenario in which sensed data and contextual
information are used to adapt and guide management decisions.
54 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
According to Dey (Costa, 2007; Dey and Abowd, 20 0 0), context
is understood as any information that characterizes the situation
of a person, place or object relevant to the application. Context-
aware applications generally assume that contextual information is
complete and accurate; however, as a result of noise, failures in
sensors and other factors, the sensed data may be subject to error
(Henricksen and Indulska, 2004). Thus, one of the major challenges
of building services and context sensitive applications is knowing
how to handle imperfect contexts, as they can lead to inappropri-
ate application behavior.
Quality of Context (QoC) parameters can be used to measure
the quality of information and solve conflicts that arise in the han-
dling of contextual information. A number of relevant quality met-
rics within the scope of context sensitive applications were sug-
gested by some research works (Buchholz et al., 2003; Manzoor
et al., 2008; Neisse et al., 2008). These may be used as indicators
of contextual information quality.
Quality of Service (QoS) has been defined as the ability to guar-
antee that the service requirements of applications can be met
(Balen et al., 2011). A set of QoS parameters, such as latency,
throughput, and reliability, are used for evaluating the performance
of networks. Originally, the Internet was conceived as a best-effort
network, offering no quality guarantees for the supported services.
With its growth and evolution, there has been an increasing de-
mand for multimedia services, which has led Internet research
groups and Internet standardization boards to pursue solutions for
effective support of real-time services with QoS assurance.
Two major end-to-end QoS-signaling approaches for QoS pro-
visioning in the Internet were developed: (i) Integrated Services
(IntServ) (Tian He et al., 2003), which provides hard guarantees;
and (ii) Differentiated Services (DiffServ) (Karamchati et al., 2017),
which offers soft guarantees.
IntServ (IETF, 2017a) is a QoS implementation model designed
to ensure the quality for individual traffic flows using both end-
to-end signaling and resource reservation throughout the network.
IntServ provides a virtual dedicated link connecting a source and
a destination while performing checks of the desired bandwidth
and delay requirements to provide per-flow reservation. Therefore,
every node must maintain the state information about every com-
munication. The Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) (IETF, 2017b;
Pana and Put, 2013) is the most representative example of the
IntServ approach.
DiffServ (IETF, 2017c) is a model that provides QoS assurance by
differentiating the traffic flow. DiffServ offers an improved service
in the traditional best effort model by providing different level of
service classes. For example, DiffServ will decrease the latency in
traffic containing streaming video, while providing best effort ser-
vice to traffic containing file transfers. Unlike IntServ, each node in
DiffServ regards every flow differently; therefore, it is unnecessary
to provide state information about every flow along the network
path.
Implementing these two Internet QoS-signaling models directly
on WSN would not be feasible. WSN has several distinctive char-
acteristics that differentiate it from the Internet, including higher
loss, resources constraints, and highly dynamic network topology.
These features make implementing QoS in WSN a challenge.
IntServ depends primarily on saving the bandwidth between
source and destination. At the same time, state information is
saved on intermediate nodes. This becomes unfeasible for many
reasons. For example, the sensor node’s limited memory means
that it cannot save per-flow state information and the route be-
tween source and destination at the beginning of transmission pro-
cess is usually unknown. As complex as IntServ, DiffServ faces sim-
ilar problems. As mentioned, DiffServ queues and prioritizes pack-
ets based on their service priority level, which is a problem for the
sensor nodes that rarely have the memory capacity required for
queuing. As a result, the existing approaches ensuring QoS in the
Internet are not applicable in WSNs. A survey of research efforts
on QoS for WSN can be found in Chen and Varshney (2004) and
Chen et al. (2011).
Some researchers have worked with QoS aspects at an applica-
tion level. For example, Jin et al. (2012) proposed network archi-
tectures for smart city applications in order to maintain QoS guar-
antees. Akzhalova (2014) proposed a business process modeling of
a QoS-aware service system for oil reservoir automation control in
order to avoid loss of transmission data and guarantee a certain
level of reliability by using, when necessary, an alternative way
to transfer data. Rodrigues et al. (2015b) presented a code gen-
eration approach using a health monitoring application scenario
that allows to manipulate QoS parameters, such as energy policy or
data transmission rate, at modeling level. In this approach, changes
made at modeling level are used as a basis to promote changes in
low-level network parameters. For example, it is possible to alter
the node duty cycle and extend the radio sleeping time interval.
In this systematic mapping study, we look for the presence of
modeling support for high-level aspects in the code generation
process, and analyze how suitable they are, taking into considera-
tion the dynamic behavior of applications that require increasingly
accurate and reliable information.
2.3.2. Energy consumption aspects
The reduction of energy consumption in the deployment of
WSN solutions should be a major concern for the stakehold-
ers. (Anastasi et al., 2009). Since 2003, when the first version of
the IEEE.802.15.4 standard was published (IEEE Computer Society,
2011), there have been many studies that explore mechanisms or
techniques for the reduction of node energy consumption in a
WSN. In April 2017, a search of the IEEE Explore Digital Library
was done using the search string “Wireless Sensor” AND “Energy
Consumption” and this returned 11,657 studies, reinforcing the rel-
evance of this the topic within the scientific community.
This concern for energy conservation in WSN can be justified
by the fact that the network must be able to fulfill the application
requirements before the battery runs out. In many cases, this may
require a battery lifetime of several months to years, making en-
ergy consumption an essential metric in the design of WSNs. Fur-
thermore, there are contexts in which recharging a battery is un-
feasible due to the hostile or unpractical environment in which a
node was deployed.
The need to saving energy in a WSN raises a central question,
which is: “how can the network lifetime be maximized?” The usual
approach to address this problem is to minimize the energy con-
sumption in one of the communication layers, expecting a reduc-
tion on the overall energy consumption of the entire network and
the application. This approach includes, for example, creating low-
power hardware at physical layer (Gamal et al., 2002; Shih et al.,
2001; Wang et al., 2001), providing efficient Medium Access Con-
trol (MAC) protocols at data-link layer (Halkes and Langendoen,
2007; Polastre et al., 2004; Rajendran et al., 2003; van Dam and
Langendoen, 2003) developing energy-aware routing protocols at
network layer (Heinzelman et al., 20 0 0; Yu et al., 2001).
At the physical layer, different hardware components can be re-
designed to be more energy efficient. For instance, improvements
can be made to modify the transceiver power consumption, such
as, adjusting the modulation scheme, data rate, or the operational
duty cycle. At the data-link layer, since transmission is the most
energy-consuming task in a sensor node, the most effective way
to conserve energy is by putting the radio transceiver in the (low-
power) sleep mode whenever communication is not required. Error
control schemes are also used to minimize packet retransmissions,
reducing the power consumed at the transceiver even further. At
the network level, traffic forwarding is distributed between nodes
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
in an energy-efficient way by power-aware routing protocols and
topology management. QoS-based energy-aware routing protocols
are useful for achieving balance between energy consumption and
data quality. Furthermore, by incorporating data compression and
aggregation techniques, data transmission can be limited substan-
tially. This results in fewer transmissions and consequently, a re-
duction in energy consumption by reducing packet size.
More recently, energy consumptions has been a concern at
higher layers as well, for instance, at the application layer. When
dealing with technical aspects of energy conservation across the
different layers, it is possible to make certain decisions that can
directly impact energy consumption. For example, the intervals of
temperature readings defined for an application that requires some
type of product or medical monitoring system will directly impact
the energy consumption of the node. In this way, the monitor-
ing process identifies the largest acceptable interval between tem-
perature readings resulting in a reduced number of transmissions
and, consequently, a reduction in energy consumption. This deci-
sion can be incorporated into the code generation approach archi-
tecture used in such a way that the proposed system already pro-
vides features that recommend ways to minimize the impact on
energy consumption of the application.
Another example of high-level energy-aware strategy is that
proposed by Rodrigues et al. (2013). The idea behind the approach
is to create a simulation estimating the energy consumption before
the deployment of application’s code on the nodes. This allows the
application developer to generate a node code with efficient energy
consumption.
2.3.3. Use of middleware to support the modeling or the code
generation process
The use of middleware systems to assist the modeling and code
generation approach is an important aspect to consider. Whether
or not to use a middleware is an architecture decision that affects
all stages of the code generation process, and the flexibility and
interoperability of the solution.
Middleware is a layer of software or a combination of sub-
layers interposed between the technological levels of the appli-
cation. Middleware systems provide an infrastructure to support
the development of distributed applications promoting the reuse
of functionalities and masking platform details (Almeida, 2006).
Razzaque et al. (2016) emphasizes the most important middleware
aspect: to facilitate the distributed application development pro-
cess in an integrated and heterogeneous environment, and pro-
moting interoperability between the different applications and ser-
vices. Examples of the functions present in middleware systems in-
clude: service discovery, service composition, privacy control, secu-
rity mechanisms, data access and integration, context support and
sensitivity.
A fundamental characteristic of a middleware is its ability to
hide the low-level programming details in order to facilitate the
job of the programmer. In other words, middleware systems of-
fer programming abstractions that are closer to high-level aspects
than the low-level aspects (Römer et al., 2002). In this sense, by
using an IoT-middleware the programmer is not concerned with
specific platform details, such as protocol configurations, operat-
ing system, node code language, routing protocol configurations or
other low-level aspects.
Recent analysis of the literature has identified several IoT-
middleware proposals with different approaches and requirements
to support the development IoT applications. Razzaque et al.
(2016), for example, describe advantages, facilities and features of
IoT middleware systems, however, the authors also highlight that
no single solution exists that is able to support all the IoT require-
ments; consequently, each middleware is more suitable for a group
of applications.
55
Among the selected papers, there are some examples that il-
lustrate how one can use an IoT-middleware to facilitate the code
generation process. For example, Rodrigues et al. (2015a) proposed
an extension of a node code generation MDA approach to auto-
matically generate tailored middleware components according to
a domain point of view, including functional and non-functional
requirements for a target platform. Another example is a frame-
work based on BPMN to generate Callas code, a specific language
based on Java and its virtual machine proposed by Domingos et al.
(2010). To improve the proposal, they integrate the solution with
Middleware Framework For the Internet of Things (MuFFIN), which
is able to execute the Callas code.
2.3.4. Service and resource-oriented architecture
The traditional Information Technology (IT) model is in decline
within the enterprise environment (Hughes, A., Murray, 2015). A
survey conducted in 2015 by the International Data Corporation
(IDC) indicates that manufacturers around world are opting to
adopt a private or public cloud as a means of extending IT infras-
tructure. In the United States, 41% of manufacturers indicated the
preference of accessing IT resources via the public cloud. Almost
50% of European manufacturing have adopted or will adopt En-
terprise Resource Planning (ERP) in a public cloud. In Asia/Pacific,
49% of manufacturers are using or intend to use a public or private
cloud.
Cloud technology is one of the solutions indicated for support-
ing large-scale data produced by sensors. In this big data sce-
nario it is necessary to provide a way to receive large data traf-
fic from different kinds of sensor platforms that interoperate in
an open, standardized, platform-independent, flexible and adapt-
able way (Alamri et al., 2013; Dai and Wang, 2010).
Due to the complexity and heterogeneity of protocols, tech-
nologies, services, networking plays an important and fundamental
role on the cloud, requiring a distribution architecture that is able
to address these challenges with convergence, decoupling services
and virtualization of network resources. The most promising ap-
proach to provide the network-cloud convergence with effective ar-
chitectural concepts is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a
distributed computing approach based on open network protocols
and data encoding standards. By providing vendor and platform in-
dependence, SOA has been widely adopted for the interconnection
of heterogeneous systems.
The concept of service, a well-defined and self-contained re-
mote function call, is at the core of SOA. A set of available services
can be combined in a composite service by means of a process
known as orchestration. Service and device discovery is another
functionality commonly available in a SOA system.
There are many methods and technologies for addressing and
deploying SOA. Although there are a number of different open and
proprietary solutions conforming to service-orientation, one of the
most important SOA concepts is the Web Service technology (WS)
(Santanna, 2010). WS is a software component that is defined as
a service and accessible via a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) by
standard Internet protocols such as HTTP and HTTPS among oth-
ers. The service follows a standard interface communication that
exchanges messages between the client and the server. Web Ser-
vices Description Language (WSDL) is the standard language based
on XML syntax that is used to describe the WS mechanisms.
The SOA transportation component represents the formats of
messages and protocols used to communicate with a WS. Thus,
by adopting SOA the programmer does not need to be concerned
with network protocols, platforms, packet sizes or other low-level
details. The use of WS makes accessing specific methods a rel-
atively simple task (Priyantha et al., 2008). Two contemporary
ways to implement WS transportation are the Simple Object Ac-
cess Protocol (SOAP) and the REpresentational State Transfer (REST)
56 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
(Vujovic et al., 2014). REST has some advantages over SOAP: it is
the most widely used, it is easier to learn, and it uses smaller for-
mat messages and lightweight processing. Thus, it is a preferred
option to interoperate with WSN applications.
SOA has now been adopted in different cloud paradigms includ-
ing paradigms suitable to deploy IoT solutions or to interoperate
data traffic received from a WSN to a cloud application (Corredor
et al., 2012). However, WS standards require substantial resources
that are generally not available on sensor nodes (for example, XML
is too resource consuming for WSN embedded devices). In this
sense, research has been done in order to lower the resource re-
quirements of WS implementations for WSN low power devices.
In response to this, Corredor et al. (2012) proposed a SOA middle-
ware for integrating embedded devices into the Web of Things. The
middleware provides a framework through the gateway-based ap-
proach to reveal the capabilities of the sensors in RESTful services,
one of the most commonly used REST variants.
2.3.5. Dynamic code updating
Regardless of the proposed solution for coding a WSN applica-
tion, be it through modeling and (semi)automatic code generation
from high-level languages or using manual low-level platform code
programming, the initial deployment effort is basically the same.
After the code generation, it is necessary to upload the code into
all nodes of the application. The last step is the node deployment
according to the topology proposed to the WSN application.
After the application deployment, it may be necessary to
change or upgrade the code that is running on each network node.
For example, one should change the frequency of the sensor read-
ing or the configuration parameters used by the routing algorithm.
Dynamic code update (also called reprogramming) is defined as
the ability that a given solution has to automatically spread con-
figuration parameters or new chunks of codes, using radio links, in
a running network in order to change or adapt its behavior (Dong
et al., 2014). The network scalability is considerably affected when
it is necessary to retrieve the device, manually update its code and
reinstall it in the original location. This became more critical when
the nodes are installed in inhospitable locations.
The choice of using any kind of reprogramming technique de-
pends on the original code deployed on the node. It must be pre-
pared to receive code updates and deal with it appropriately. For
example, in the TinyOS-based platform is possible to use Deluge
(Dong et al., 2014), which allows the dissemination of the full-
image through the radio links to all nodes. The main problem with
this kind of code update approach is its high-cost since the entire
code must be transferred and reinstalled into all nodes. In most
cases only a small part of the application needs to change, so it
is not necessary to spend nodes energy and application time to
transfer and reinstall the entire code.
Therefore, a natural alternative solution for the dynamic code
update in a WSN application is to ensure that the first version of
the application code can be updated with low use of bandwidth
and low power consumption. Furthermore, it should not compro-
mise the operation of the application that is running on WSN
throughout the update process.
It should be noted that the increase in the complexity and the
dynamic behavior of the IoT solutions make the code updating
in a running WSN a relatively common event. For example, in a
competitive market the business rules tend to change more fre-
quently in order to adapt to new demands. This tends to increase
the sharing of sensed data with different applications which have
different demands, requiring reprogramming after the initial de-
ployment (Balani et al., 2006). Thus, the effort required to update
the node codes in an IoT solution should be taken into considera-
tion.
Table 1
Search string to find secondary studies.
Part 1 - Search terms Part 2 - Search terms
(“Wireless Sensor” OR “Sensor AND (“systematic literature review” OR
networks” OR “Actuator “systematic review” OR
Networks” OR “Internet of “systematic mapping” OR
Things” OR “Web of Things”) “mapping study” OR “systematic
literature mapping”)
Table 2
Scientific digital library sources.
Scientific digital library Universal resource location
IEEE Xplore http://ieeexplore.ieee.org
ACM digital library http://portal.acm.org
Science direct http://www.sciencedirect.com
Springerlink http://www.springerlink.com
Web of science http://www.webofknowledge.com
Scopus http://www.scopus.com
Compendex http://www.engineeringvillage.com
2.4. Related works
This work is considered as a secondary study as it is based on
the analysis of primary studies (Kitchenham et al., 2011; Kitchen-
ham and Charters, 2007; Souza et al., 2015). All the papers ana-
lyzed according to the results obtained from the sources are pri-
mary studies. In order to identify the existence of other secondary
studies related to the same focus topic of this work, a tertiary
study was conducted, using the search string presented in Table 1.
A tertiary study is a review of secondary studies related to the
same research question. This search string was applied to each
source presented in Table 2 in three metadata fields: title, abstract
and keywords.
The search string was performed with seven scientific digital
libraries that are considered the most relevant to the objectives
of this work. Table 2 presents the sources used in this systematic
mapping study.
The search for secondary studies was executed on February
2016 and returned a total of 96 publications from all sources. No
systematic mapping or systematic review publication with similar
goals to this review was found. The review proposed by Malavolta
and Muccini (2014) was the only with some similarities to this re-
view. However, the search strings used by Malavolta are generic
and were performed only in Google Scholar. There is no guaran-
tee that the returned Google Scholar publications are able to in-
dex the main scientific digital library sources presented in Table 2.
Although the study conducted by Malavolta focuses on MDE ap-
proaches, his conclusions highlights the need for further investiga-
tion in this area. This became one of the directions taken for the
present study.
The same search string used in this systematic mapping study
(see Table 4, Section 3.2) was applied in the Google Scholar search
engine in April 2016 in order to test its viability for use in this
study. The search returned a total of 16,800 publications and due
to this large number it became impracticable to perform a con-
sistent systematic mapping study. This test served to reinforce the
importance of using alternative scientific digital library sources for
this specific systematic mapping study.
3. Research method
This systematic mapping study was performed following the
guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. (2011), Kitchenham and
Charters (2007). A systematic mapping involves three main phases
that are also referred to in this review as stages. The Planning
phase refers to the pre-review activities and aims at establishing
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
a review protocol defining the research questions (i.e., the research
topic of interest), the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the sources
of studies, the search string, the systematic mapping procedures
and the selection of the control papers. The control papers are pa-
pers that closely match with the objectives of the study and the
inclusion and exclusion criteria used to define the selected papers.
Thus, the control papers should be part of the selected papers.
The next phase is the Conducting phase, in which the re-
searchers search, select and analyze the studies, in order to extract
and synthesize data from them. This phase is characterized by the
execution of a plan defined in the Planning phase. The last phase
is the Reporting phase. This phase is characterized by the writing
of the results to answer the research questions.
The remainder of this section presents the methodological as-
pects related to the systematic mapping performed in this work.
Section 3.1 presents the systematic mapping objective and re-
search questions. Section 3.2 presents the terms and search string
used. Section 3.3 describes the study selection criteria. Section
3.4 presents the data storage phase. Section 3.5 presents the pro-
tocol assessment. Section 3.6 presents the data extraction and syn-
thesis. Section 3.7 presents the classification scheme and, finally,
Section 3.8 presents the limitations of this systematic mapping.
3.1. Research questions
As stated in the introductory section, the main objective of this
systematic mapping study is to investigate the adoption of Model-
Driven and Business Process approaches to support the design, de-
velopment and automatic code generation for WSN/IoT applica-
tions based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard (IEEE Computer Soci-
ety, 2011). The investigation tries to understand the motivations
to adopt these approaches in the context of WSN/IoT applications
and their main benefits, identifying research gaps and tendencies,
aiming at new research possibilities. Table 3 presents the research
questions (RQs) and the rationales that motivated their inclusion
in this systematic mapping.
3.2. Terms and search string
The search string used in this study is a single sequence of
terms that is designed to return all the publications with the MDA
and BPM approaches in WSN or IoT area. Table 4 presents the
search string that was applied to each source in three metadata
fields: title, abstract and keywords. It is necessary to adapt the
search string for each advanced search, according to the specifici-
ties of each digital library search engine in the advanced command
search option. A specific script (Rohten, 2016) was used to filter the
Springer digital library results in order to search for only the se-
lected metadata fields. When trying to use the search string with-
out the specific script, the engine searched within the whole paper
returning 2.213 publications. This huge number of papers made the
analysis process unfeasible due to the number of results that did
not match the objectives of the systematic mapping. The script fil-
tered the results, returning only 77 papers for analysis. The search
string presented in Table 4 was performed with the same scientific
digital libraries showed in Table 2.
3.3. Inclusion and exclusion criteria
There is one Inclusion Criteria (IC) and six Exclusion Criteria (EC).
The IC1 is “The paper addresses WSN modeling or code generation
processes”. The exclusion criteria are: EC1 “The paper does not have
an abstract”, EC2 “The paper is just published as an abstract”, EC3
“The paper is not written in English”, EC4 “The paper is an older ver-
sion of another study already considered”, EC5 “The paper is not a
primary study, such as an editorial, summary of keynotes, workshop
57
or tutorial” and EC6 “The complete paper is unavailable” . The selec-
tion criteria defined above was inspired by six systematic mapping
or systematic reviews with research topics related to the objective
and research questions used in this study (Cerqueira et al., 2016;
Fonseca et al., 2016; Guessi et al., 2012; Maia et al., 2007; Nardi
et al., 2013; Souza et al., 2015). The selected criteria used in these
studies obtained effective results. After completing pilot tests for
all the seven digital libraries, it was possible to confirm that the
selection criteria listed above was able to achieve consistent re-
sults.
3.4. Data storage
A spreadsheet (Teixeira et al., 2016) was prepared and used to
support and record the results of all the phases and stages of this
systematic mapping. The use of a spreadsheet for the organization,
standardization and the execution of the systematic mapping pro-
tocol facilitated this work. The spreadsheet is available online with
the results and analysis that were obtained through this systematic
mapping study.
The Planning phase tab in the spreadsheet contains the objec-
tives and other relevant details such as control papers and the in-
clusion and exclusion criteria. There are five tabs for the Conducting
phase. The ‘1st Stage’ tab contains every result from all the scien-
tific digital libraries including any repetitions. As expected, there
are duplicate records because some publications are indexed in
more than one digital library. There is an identifier for each pa-
per, including the source, publication year and the title. The ‘2nd
Stage’ tab contains all the records without the duplicates that were
identified in the first stage and with an assigned ID number for
each paper. In this stage, the first analysis is made by reading the
abstract and applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The re-
viewers check at least 35% of the analysis in this stage to ensure
the consistency of the analysis. The approved papers are recorded
in the ‘3rd Stage’ tab and then an analysis is done of the full pa-
pers. Once again, the selection criteria is applied and all the re-
sults of this analysis are recorded. The reviewers check at least 35%
of the analysis again. The ‘4th Stage’ tab contains only the papers
that were approved in the previous stage and these become the
selected papers for this systematic mapping. It is at this stage that
the final analysis is done by answering the research questions and
recording other relevant statistical data, such as, approach type,
design concept, framework, etc. All the RQs were checked by the
reviewers at this stage. The ‘Final Stage’ tab contains the complete
reference for each selected paper. The Legend tab contains the de-
scription of all the terms used at the ‘4th Stage’ . Other tabs were
created to include graphics and reports for the Reporting phase.
No manual techniques such as snowballing, direct search to
publications of researchers and research groups were applied. This
decision was made based on the large number of results returned
from the search engines only using the search string. The general
string was effective in meeting the objectives of the systematic
mapping.
3.5. Assessment
A test or calibration process was performed to avoid surprises
that may result in inconsistencies if an error occurred during any
part of the conducting phase. Initially, a pilot test was performed
on the systematic mapping protocol using the IEEE Xplore source
in order to analyze the adequacy and consistency between the ob-
jectives of the systematic mapping and the proposed analysis cri-
teria. This check also allowed the search string to be analyzed by
verifying the relevance and matching the results to the systematic
mapping objectives.
58 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
Table 3
Research questions and their rationales.
RQ ID Research question
RQ01 Which high-level aspects are treated by the
modeling or code generation process?
RQ02 Which strategies are used for controlling or
reducing the node energy consumption?
RQ03 Is there any type of middleware supporting the
modeling or code generation process?
RQ04 Does the approach for modeling and code
generation apply some sort of
service-orientation in their conceptual
architecture or deployment process?
RQ05 Does the approach allow any type of dynamic
code update after the code generation
process?
Table 4
Search string.
Part 1 - Search terms Part 2 - Search terms
(“Wireless Sensor” OR “Sensor AND ((“Model-Driven” OR “MDA” OR
networks” OR “Actuator “MDE” OR “MDD”) OR
Networks” OR “Internet of (“BPMN” OR “BPM” OR
Things” OR “Web of Things”) “Business Process”))
The results of the pilot test were registered in the systematic
mapping protocol spreadsheet by the first two authors. A sample
of at least 35% of the results of the pilot test was reviewed by the
other three authors who analyzed and validated a sample of 35%
of the results from the other digital libraries.
Once this pilot test analysis and verification process was com-
plete, the exact same process was repeated with the other Scien-
tific Digital Library Sources that are presented in Table 2 of Section
2.4. Then, the results from each new source were compared with
those already obtained and recorded on the spreadsheet as a way
of double-checking the consistency of the search string. Any un-
certainty arising from a result was discussed and verified by the
reviewers to avoid inconsistencies.
After applying the protocol to all publications returned from all
digital libraries, it was concluded that the protocol was ready to
be executed as per the stages of the Conducting phase described
in Fig. 1 in the following subsection.
Rationale
As aforementioned, WSN applications can benefit from the use of high-level requirements at the
design stage. This RQ aims to identify which of the high-level requirements discussed in Section
2.3.1 are addressed by the studies and how the implementation is accomplished from the high-level
specification to low-level deployment. This capability gives the stakeholders, who have little or no
low-level knowledge of the platform, the opportunity to specify requirements that will impact the
MDA architecture or the model transformation process. For example, a user of a healthcare
application may need to set up privacy or security thresholds to avoid inappropriate access of the
patients’ vital signs.
As discussed in Section 2.3.2, the power consumption is an important aspect in WSN applications.
Accordingly, applications and communication protocols should adjust their behavior to reduce
energy consumption and avoid power loses and consequent batteries changes (Delicato et al., 2005).
For example, if there is no way to prevent unnecessary sending, receiving or acknowledgment of
packages, the energy consumption grows considerably, reducing the service life of the battery node
(Loureiro et al., 2003; Ruiz, 2003). This RQ aims to identify if the modeling and code generation
process employ some sort of energy consumption strategy as part of their approaches, for example,
the use of mechanisms to help the developer to analyze the energy consumption before generating
the node code.
As discussed in Section 2.3.3 the code generation process is a complex task that involves many steps.
Therefore, considering its potential benefits, some researchers choose to use a middleware to
simplify the modeling and code generation process. This RQ aims to analyze and identify the
middleware used to support the modeling or code generation solution. By adopting a middleware
solution, it is possible to focus on higher-level aspects, leaving low-level questions or details to be
handled by the middleware itself. Because this choice considerably affects the whole modeling and
code generation process, it is important to identify in which ways a middleware may affect the
solution. For example, a BPM approach can expand the scope of its solution allowing the generated
code to be executed on a hardware platform different from that for which the specific code was
generated (Domingos et al., 2010).
As discussed in Section 2.3.4 there are many possibilities and different ways to deploy a
service-oriented approach. This RQ aims to analyze and identify the features used to implement a
type of SOA in an IoT/WSN cloud-driven environment.
As discussed in Section 2.3.5, code update can be very difficult or even impossible in WSN topologies
with many nodes located in inaccessible or inhospitable environments. In these scenarios, automatic
code update approaches become a relevant issue that has great impact on application maintenance.
Thus, the modeling and code generation process should provide an option to reduce the high cost
of manual reprogramming. As the automatic reprogramming technique is entirely dependent on the
generated node code and the node system operation, it is necessary to consider the use of an
effective code dissemination technique during the entire code generation process. This RQ aims to
map which dynamic code update techniques are used during the code generation process and how
this is accomplished.
3.6. Data extraction and synthesis
Only papers from 2004 and after were identified. This was
expected as the first version of IEEE 802.15.4 standard (IEEE
Computer Society, 2011) started in 2003. No date restriction was
set and the default values in the advanced command search option
were used. The conducting phase was executed in February 2016.
A total of 1.374 publications were returned at the ‘1st Stage’: 205
from IEEE, 68 from ACM, 10 from Science Direct, 77 from Springer,
145 from Web of Science, 429 from Scopus and 440 from Compen-
dex.
The ‘2nd Stage’ started with the elimination of the duplicate
records identified in the ‘1st Stage’ that reached a total of 601 pub-
lications. This stage is characterized by the reading and analysis of
the abstracts and the recording of any inclusion or exclusion crite-
ria.
The ‘3rd Stage’ started with the elimination of all records from
the previous stage that did not match the inclusion criteria or
matched any exclusion criteria. This left a total of 284 records. This
stage is characterized by the reading and analysis of the full papers
and the recording of the inclusion or exclusion criteria.
The ‘4th Stage’ started with the elimination of all records from
the previous stage that did not match the inclusion criteria or did
match at least one of the exclusion criteria. This left a total of 59
selected papers for the mapping. This stage is characterized by a
full reading of all the selected papers to answer and record the
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
Fig. 1. Step by step of all stages of the Conducting phase.
results of the RQ. Finally, the ‘Final Stage’ is characterized by the
recording and completion of the references for all the selected pa-
Table 5
pers. To better understand the Conducting phase, Fig. 1 shows an
Selected papers for the systematic mapping (BPM/BPMN approach).
overview of all the stages, step by step.
Tables 5, 6 and 7 present the complete reference of the selected
papers. Each selected paper was identified with the “#” character
plus the ID number. For the remainder of this paper, the identi-
fier “#ID” is used to reference each selected paper of this mapping
review.
3.7. Classification scheme
A classification scheme, reported in Table 8, was defined to bet-
ter interpret the results. Furthermore, each RQ was analyzed to
propose classification terms to support the RQ answers. The IEEE
Xplore was the primary digital library used in initial tests to an-
alyze and verify the consistency of the entire protocol applied in
this work (Teixeira et al., 2016). In addition, it was also a way
of helping in the identification and validation of the classification
scheme presented in Table 8. As aforementioned in Section 3.5, this
test revealed where adjustments to the protocol were needed and
these were made before the execution of the entire process using
the other Scientific Digital Library Sources. For example, the search
string that was used in the pilot test with IEEE Xplore was dif-
ferent to the final version that was presented in Table 4, and in
the Search String used to find secondary studies, recorded in Table
1. In each test, the search terms were improved in order to ob-
tain results that were more aligned and consistent with the objec-
tives of the research questions used for this systematic mapping.
Once the search string had been adjusted and validated, the Con-
ducting phase was reinitiated. Some adjustments were also made
to the Classification scheme, which initially used different terms
and classifications than those presented in Table 8. During the pi-
lot tests, the original proposal was refined, evaluated and improved
until reaching the final version.
59
ID Complete reference
#22 Caracas, A. From business process models to pervasive applications:
Synchronization and optimization. 2012 IEEE Int. Conf. Pervasive
Comput. Commun. Work. PERCOM Work. 2012 2012, 320–325.
#30 Rosales, P.; Oh, K.; Kim, K.; Jung, J.-Y. Leveraging business process
management through complex event processing for RFID and
sensor networks. 40th Int. Conf. Comput. Indutrial Eng. 2010,
1–6.
#57 Li, S.; Qiao, X.; Li, X. Study on the architecture of platform for
internet of things service based on EDSOA. Proc. - 2012 IEEE
12th Int. Conf. Comput. Inf. Technol. CIT 2012 2012, 953–959.
#77 Glombitza, N.; Lipphardt, M.; Werner, C.; Fischer, S. Using graphical
process modeling for realizing SOA programming paradigms in
sensor networks. WONS 2009 - 6th Int. Conf. Wirel. On-demand
Netw. Syst. Serv. 2009, 61–68.
#95 Puder, A.; Odenwald, T. Augmenting smart items with business
intelligence. Proc. 2007 2nd Int. Conf. Commun. Syst. Softw.
Middlew. Work. COMSWARE 20 07 20 07.
#158 Kim, S. D.; Lee, J. Y.; Kim, D. Y.; Park, C. W.; La, H. J. Modeling
BPEL-based collaborations with heterogeneous IoT devices. Proc.
- 2014 World Ubiquitous Sci. Congr. 2014 IEEE 12th Int. Conf.
Dependable, Auton. Secur. Comput. DASC 2014 2014, 289–294.
#276 Dar, K.; Taherkordi, A.; Baraki, H.; Eliassen, F.; Geihs, K. A resource
oriented integration architecture for the Internet of Things: A
business process perspective. Pervasive Mob. Comput. 2015, 20,
145–159.
#298 Ruppen, A.; Meyer, S. An Approach for a Mutual Integration of the
Web of Things with Business Processes. 2013, 1–15.
#295 Domingos, D.; Martins, F.; Caiola, L. Decentralising Internet of
Things Aware BPMN Business Processes. 2010, 24, 110–119.
#299 Glombitza, N.; Ebers, S.; Pfisterer, D.; Fischer, S. Using BPEL to
realize business processes for an Internet of things. Lect. Notes
Comput. Sci. (including Subser. Lect. Notes Artif. Intell. Lect.
Notes Bioinformatics) 2011, 6811 LNCS, 294–307.
#383 Domingos, D.; Martins, F.; Cândido, C.; Martinho, R. Internet of
things aware WS-BPEL business processes - context variables
and expected exceptions. J. Univers. Comput. Sci. 2014, 20,
1109–1129.
60 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
Table 6
Selected papers for the systematic mapping (BPMN4WSN approach).
ID Complete reference
#4 Sungur, C. T.; Spiess, P.; Oertel, N.; Kopp, O. Extending BPMN for
Wireless Sensor Networks. 2013 IEEE 15th Conf. Bus. Informatics
2013, 109–116.
#15 Casati, F.; Daniel, F.; Dantchev, G.; Eriksson, J.; Finne, N.;
Karnouskos, S.; Montera, P. M.; Mottola, L.; Oppermann, F. J.;
Picco, G. Pietro; Quartulli, A.; Römer, K.; Spieß, P.; Tranquillini,
S.; Voigt, T. Towards business processes orchestrating the
physical enterprise with wireless sensor networks. 34th
International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2012,
June 2, 2012 - June 9, 2012. 2012, 1357–1360.
#292 Tranquillini, S.; Spieß, P.; Daniel, F.; Karnouskos, S.; Casati, F.;
Oertel, N.; Mottola, L.; Oppermann, F. J.; Picco, G. Pietro; Römer,
K.; Voigt, T. Process-Based Design and Integration of Wireless
Sensor Network Applications. Bus. Process Manag. Bpm 2012
2012, 7481, 134–149.
#1293 Daniel, F.; Eriksson, J.; Finne, N.; Fuchs, H.; Gaglione, A.;
Karnouskos, S.; Montero, P. M.; Mottola, L.; Oertel, N.;
Oppermann, F. J.; Picco, G. Pietro; Romer, K.; SpieB, P.;
Tranquillini, S.; Voigt, T. MakeSense: Real-world business
processes through wireless sensor networks. CEUR Workshop
Proc. 2013, 1002, 58–72.
It is highly recommendable for researchers to invest time in
these types of pilot tests and validations before beginning the Con-
ducting phase of a systematic mapping or systematic review.
3.8. Limitations of this mapping
In order to identify any possible bias, the ambiguities between
the reviewers’ analysis were minimized as much as possible. De-
spite these measures, there are still some limitations to this work.
Despite the large number of publications returned from the search
engines, it is highly possible that there are still publications that
were not identified or were not returned by the selected sources.
Naturally, a publication is not found if the contents of the meta-
data fields (title, abstract and keywords) applied to process the
search string do not match those used by authors. This is an obvi-
ous fact, however, it is important to report because different terms
may have been used but with the same semantics in this review.
In such cases, the study would not be part of the results that were
analyzed in the spreadsheet (Teixeira et al., 2016).
An additional difficulty was the absence of information in some
of the selected papers, making it difficult to answer all research
questions. The focus of any publication is influenced by the in-
terests of the authors. However, this does not necessarily imply a
problem. The authors may simply choose to focus on certain as-
pects and give less attention to others.
Whenever necessary and feasible, the references of the publi-
cations or the older versions of the same work were used in an
attempt to find the information missing from the publication. Al-
ternatively, project sites or groups related to the work of the au-
thors were used. For example, in the study #22 there is a refer-
ence to the Mote Runner as a simulation environment, and it was
discovered that this could be considered a middleware only after
accessing the Zurich IBM Research (IBM, 2017) website. This ad-
ditional research was necessary in order to find the answers to
RQ03 in this study. Another example can be seen in #4 and #1293
where, in the article, there are no references to the use of Signavio
core components to support the BPMN4WSN approach. Therefore,
it was necessary to refer to the makeSense project (Project, 2015)
to discover the framework, technologies and tools that were used.
4. Results and discussion
The results of this systematic mapping are in accordance with
Section 3.6. ‘Data Extraction and Synthesis’. The analysis of each
RQ was obtained on completion of the conducting phase and have
been described in the following sections. Due to the methodolog-
ical approach taken for this study, this section presents the quan-
titative and qualitative results with the discussion for each RQ re-
sults. The results of each RQ wil be presented in Section 4.1 and
other relevant statistical research results, such as, annual distribu-
tion of the selected papers by source, approach type, etc, used by
the selected studies in Section 4.2,
4.1. Research questions
4.1.1. High-level aspects (RQ01)
The MDE was identified as being the most common type of
approach used in the selected papers in the modeling and code
generation process. The BPMN4WSN is an extension of the BPMN
standard, therefore, for the didactic purpose of this review, it will
be presented as a separate type of approach.
It was noted that 44 (74%) of the 59 selected papers do not de-
ploy any type of high-level aspects in their approach. Of the stud-
ies that address this at an architectural level, Context-awareness,
QoS and Semantics were the most commonly researched aspects.
This is potentially because they are popular research topics with
many publications already available. None of the 59 selected pa-
pers address other equally relevant and complex aspects already
mentioned here, such as privacy and security requirements, al-
though a few papers make reference to relevant high-level issues
such as the enrichment of the data collected from the sensors by
Semantic Web technologies (e.g., OWL, RDF) - papers # 406, # 319,
and # 56.
It is also worth noting that none of the studies that adopted the
BPMN4WSN approach implemented any type of high-level aspect.
Table 9 presents the annual distribution of the high-level modeling
aspects Context-awareness, QoS and Semantic. Table 10 shows the
distribution by type of approach.
As discussed in Section 2.3.1, it is not easy to develop a
WSN/IoT solution that allows modeling a high-level aspect that,
after a series of processes, can then be dealt with on a platform
level. In the studies of Table 10, the authors themselves emphasize
the difficulty of the complete process, observing that high-level
modeling aspects require the inclusion of additional elements and
diverse treatments in the architecture proposal making the process
much more complex. The work of Corredor #406 presents a de-
tailed discussion of the different stages of the node code genera-
tion process.
Despite all the functionalities offered in Corredor’s proposal,
modeling new applications requires a considerable cognitive ef-
fort on the part of the professional. This task requires the ade-
quate knowledge to select the appropriate high-level aspects that
would be relevant for the application. Furthermore, the profes-
sional would need to know how the chosen functions benefit the
defined framework and understand and apply the correct deploy-
ment methodology.
This cognitive effort to model new application from high-level
aspects is also reported in all the studies presented in Table 10.
For example, Domingo #383 suggests that the centralized approach
traditionally adopted to address Business Processes makes it more
complex to define the mechanisms that promote the integration
of IoT features using high-level aspects. Gunalp #220 highlights
that the development of applications that are able to cope with
dynamism is very complex since the developer needs to manage
contextual changes, device and application dynamism, and busi-
ness logic. Rodrigues #306 reinforces the fact that there is a lack of
high-level abstractions and toolchains for the development of WSN
applications.
In summary, one way to minimize the cognitive effort is to
make use of mechanisms, methodologies, tools, platforms or archi-
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71 61

Table 7
Selected papers for the systematic mapping (MDE approach).

ID Complete reference

#2 Berrani, S.; Hammad, A.; Mountassir, H. Mapping SysML to Modelica to Validade Wireless Sensor Networks Non-Functional Requirements.
2013, 177–186.
#6 Boonma, P.; Somchit, Y.; Natwichai, J. A Model-Driven Engineering Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks. 2013 Eighth Int. Conf. P2P,
Parallel, Grid, Cloud Internet Comput. 2013, 671–676.
#7 Tei, K.; Shimizu, R.; Fukazawa, Y.; Honiden, S. Model-Driven-Development-Based Stepwise Wireless Sensor Networks. 2015, 45, 675–687.
#12 Saad, M. Al; Fehr, E.; Kamenzky, N.; Schiller, J. ScatterClipse: A model-driven tool-chain for developing, testing, and prototyping wireless
sensor networks. Proc. 2008 Int. Symp. Parallel Distrib. Process. with Appl. ISPA 2008 2008, 871–885.
#14 Shimizu, R.; Tei, K.; Fukazawa, Y.; Honiden, S. Toward a portability framework with multi-level models for wireless sensor network
software. Proc. 2014 Int. Conf. Smart Comput. SMARTCOMP 2014 2014, 253–260.
#16 Paulon, A. R.; Frohlich, A. A.; Becker, L. B.; Basso, F. P. Wireless sensor network UML profile to support model-driven development. 2014
12th IEEE Int. Conf. Ind. Informatics 2014, 227–232.
#201 Rodrigues, T. C.; Batista, T.; Delicato, F. C.; Pires, P. D. F. Architecture-Driven development approach for WSAN applications. Proc. - IEEE/IFIP
13th Int. Conf. Embed. Ubiquitous Comput. EUC 2015 2015, 1, 68–75.
#25 Marco, A. D.; Pace, S. Model-driven approach to Agilla Agent generation. 2013 9th Int. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. Conf. IWCMC 2013
2013, 1482–1487.
#28 Doddapaneni, K.; Ever, E.; Gemikonakli, O.; Malavolta, I.; Mostarda, L.; Muccini, H. A model-driven engineering framework for architecting
and analysing Wireless Sensor Networks. 2012 Third Int. Work. Softw. Eng. Sens. Netw. Appl. 2012, 1–7.
#56 Conzon, D.; Brizzi, P.; Kasinathan, P.; Pastrone, C.; Pramudianto, F.; Cultrona, P. Industrial application development exploiting IoT vision and
model driven programming. 2015 18th Int. Conf. Intell. Next Gener. Networks, ICIN 2015 2015, 168–175.
#91 Sommer, S.; Buckl, C.; Knoll, A. Developing service oriented sensor/actuator networks using a tailored middleware. ITNG 2009 - 6th Int.
Conf. Inf. Technol. New Gener. 2009, 1036–1041.
#110 Vujovic, V.; Maksimovic, M.; Perisic, B.; Milosevic, V. A graphical editor for RESTful sensor web networks modeling. SACI 2014 - 9th IEEE
Int. Symp. Appl. Comput. Intell. Informatics, Proc. 2014, 61–66.
#143 Riedel, T.; Fantana, N.; Genaid, A.; Yordanov, D.; Schmidtke, H. R.; Beigl, M. Using web service gateways and code generation for
sustainable IoT system development. 2010 Internet Things, IoT 2010 2010.
#157 Shih, C.; Liang, B. C. A model driven software framework for Zigbee based energy saving systems. Proc. - 3rd Int. Conf. Intell. Syst. Model.
Simulation, ISMS 2012 2012, 487–492.
#230 Thang, N. X.; Zapf, M.; Geihs, K. Model driven development for data-centric sensor network applications. Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Adv. Mob.
Comput. Multimed. - MoMM ’11 2011.
#216 Berardinelli, L.; Cortellessa, V.; Pace, S. Modeling and analyzing performance of software for wireless sensor networks. 2nd Int. Work.
Softw. Eng. Sens. Netw. Appl. SESENA 2011, Conjunction with Int. Conf. Softw. Eng. ICSE 2011 2011, 13–18.
#225 Grace, P.; Barbosa, J.; Pickering, B.; Surridge, M. Taming the Interoperability Challenges of Complex IoT Systems. Proc. 1st ACM Work.
Middlew. Context. Appl. IoT 2014, 1–6.
#217 Hammad, A.; Mountassir, H.; Chouali, S. An approach combining sysml and modelica for modelling and validate wireless sensor networks.
1st ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Int. Work. Softw. Eng. Syst. SESoS 2013 Proc. 2013, 5–12.
#302 Beckmann, K.; Thoss, M. A model-driven software development approach using OMG DDS for wireless sensor networks. Softw. Technol.
Embed. Ubiquitous Syst. 2010, 95–106.
#286 Losilla, F.; Vicente-Chicote, C.; Álvarez, B.; Iborra, A.; Sánchez, P. Wireless Sensor Network Application Development: An
Architecture-Centric MDE Approach. Softw. Archit. 2007, 179–194.
#234 Fleurey, F.; Morin, B.; Solberg, A.; Barais, O. MDE to manage communications with and between resource-constrained systems. Lect. Notes
Comput. Sci. (including Subser. Lect. Notes Artif. Intell. Lect. Notes Bioinformatics) 2011, 6981 LNCS, 349–363.
#316 Akbal-Delibas, B.; Boonma, P.; Suzuki, J. Extensible and precise modeling for wireless sensor networks. Lect. Notes Bus. Inf. Process. 2009,
20 LNBIP, 551–562.
#319 Berardinelli, L.; Marco, A. Di; Pace, S. fUML-driven design and performance analysis of software agents for wireless sensor network. Eur.
Conf Software Architecture 2014, 11, 324–339.
#334 Lee, W. J.; Kang, J. M.; Heo, Y. S.; Hong, B. H. Advanced integrated model-driven development tool for USN applications in pervasive
computing environment. Commun. Comput. Inf. Sci. 2009, 56, 563–570.
#362 Patel, P.; Cassou, D. Enabling High-level Application Development for the Internet of Things. J. Syst. Softw. 2015, 103, 62–84.
#366 Vidal, C.; Fernández-Sánchez, C.; Díaz, J.; Pérez, J. A model-driven engineering process for autonomic sensor-actuator networks. Int. J.
Distrib. Sens. Networks 2015, 2015.
#373 Garcia, C. G.; Pelayo G-Bustelo, B. C.; Pascual Espada, J.; Cueva-Fernandez, G. Midgar: Generation of heterogeneous objects interconnecting
applications. A Domain Specific Language proposal for Internet of Things scenarios. Comput. Networks 2014, 64, 143–158.
#403 Jan, M., Jouvray, C., Kordon, F. Flex-eWare: a flexible model driven solution for designing and implementing embedded distributed
systems. Software-Practice & Experience 2012, 42, 1467–1494.
#405 Gámez, N.; Cubo, J.; Fuentes, L.; Pimentel, E. Configuring a context-aware middleware for wireless sensor networks. Sensors (Switzerland)
2012, 12, 8544–8570.
#406 Corredor, I.; Bernardos, A. M.; Iglesias, J.; Casar, J. R. Model-driven methodology for rapid deployment of smart spaces based on
resource-oriented architectures. Sensors (Switzerland) 2012, 12, 9286–9335.
#442 Touil, A.; Vareille, J.; Lherminier, F. Modeling and analysing ubiquitous systems. 15th IEEE International Conference on Emerging
Technologies and Factory Automation 2010.
#446 Fuentes-Fernández, R.; Guijarro, M.; Pajares, G. A multi-agent system architecture for sensor networks. Sensors 2009, 9, 10,244–10,269.
#472 Vicente-chicote, C.; Losilla, F.; Sanchez, P. Applying Mde To the Development of Flexible and Reusable. Int. J. Coop. Inf. 2007, 16, 393–412.
#534 Akzhalova, A. Model-driven QoS-aware approach for the sensor network. BMSD 2014 - Proc. 4th Int. Symp. Bus. Model. Softw. Des. 2014,
113–122.
#220 Günalp, O.; Gürgen, L.; Lestideau, V.; Lalanda, P. Autonomic pervasive applications driven by abstract specifications. Proc. 2012 Int. Work.
Self-aware internet things - Self-IoT ’12 2012, 19–24.
#236 Thang, N. X.; Geihs, K. Model-driven development with optimization of non-functional constraints in sensor network. Proc. 2010 ICSE
Work. Softw. Eng. Sens. Netw. Appl. - SESENA ’10 2010, 61–65.
#807 Saad A., M.; Fehr, E.; Kamenzky, N.; Schiller, J. Model-driven visual testing and debugging of WSN applications. J. Networks 2009, 4,
607–621.
#882 Ulbrich, A.; Weis, T.; Geihs, K.; Allee, W. A Modeling Language for Applications in Pervasive Computing Environments. 2nd Int. Work.
Model. Methodol. Pervasive Embed. Softw. MOMPES’05 2005, 109–123.
(continued on next page)
62 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71

Table 7 (continued)

ID Complete reference

#306 Rodrigues, T.; Delicato, F. C.; Batista, T.; Pires, P. F.; Pirmez, L. An approach based on the domain perspective to develop WSAN
applications. Softw. Syst. Model. 2015, 1–29.
#229 Ruppen, A.; Pasquier, J.; Meyer, S.; Rüedlinger, A. A component based approach for the Web of Things. 2015.
#258 Schwalb, T.; Schmid, J. Component-based models for runtime control and monitoring of embedded systems. Proceedings of the 5th
International Workshop on Model Based Architecting and Construction of Embedded Systems 2012, 31–36.
#179 Schachinger, D.; Kastner, W. Model-driven integration of building automation systems into Web service gateways. IEEE Int. Work. Fact.
Commun. Syst. - Proceedings WFCS 2015, 1–8.
#185 Thang, X. N.; Tran, H. T.; Baraki, H.; Geihs, K. FRASAD: A framework for model-driven IoT Application Development. IEEE World Forum
Internet Things, WF-IoT 2015 - Proc 2016, 387–392.
#918 Pramudianto, F.; Kamienski, C. A.; Souto, E.; Borelli, F.; Gomes, L. L.; Sadok, D.; Jarke, M. IoT Link: An Internet of Things Prototyping
Toolkit. Proc. - 2014 IEEE Int. Conf. Ubiquitous Intell. Comput. 2014 IEEE Int. Conf. Auton. Trust. Comput. 2014 IEEE Int. Conf. Scalable
Comput. Commun. Assoc. Sy 2015, 1–9.

Table 8 Table 9
Classification scheme for each RQ. Annual distribution of high-level modeling aspects.

RQ ID Classification issue Classification terms used High-level aspect

RQ01 There are some terms that have already High-level-Aspect-Name Year Context-awareness QoS Semantics
been identified in the control
2005
papers. These classification terms
2006
are directly related to the name of
2007
high-level aspect used to model the
2008
application. For example, QoS, QoC,
2009 #91
Privacy, Security, Context-Awareness,
2010 #30 #302
Semantic-Awareness.
2011
RQ02 This classification term was proposed Yes-No-Logical-Identifier
2012 #220, #405 #403 #406
to identify the approaches that are
2013
concerned with the node energy
2014 #383, #225 #534 #319
consumption. It is useful to know if
2015 #295 #201, #306 #56
this is addressed in the study or not.
RQ03 The categories of classification of this Middleware-Name
RQ are open and without a
pre-defined classification term. If a Table 10
middleware was identified, the Distribution of high-level modeling aspects by type of approach.
middleware name was used for
High-level aspect
classification. If not, it was classified
as “Yes” or “No”. Type of approach Context-awareness QoS Semantics
RQ04 This classification term was proposed Yes-No-Logical-Identifier
BPM/BPMN #30,#383,#295
to identify if the approach use or
BPMN4WSN
propose any form of service-oriented
MDE #220,#405,#225 #534,#201,#306, #319,#56, #406
architecture to model, generate or
#403,#91,#302
deploy WSN applications. It is useful
to know whether this is addressed
in the study or not.
Table 11
RQ05 This classification term was proposed Yes-No-Logical-Identifier
Annual distribution of energy performance concerns as-
to identify if the approach supports
pects.
a way to dynamic updating of the
sensor code using radio links. It is Type of approach
useful to know whether this is
addressed in the study or not. Year BPM/BPMN BPMN4WSN MDE

2005
2006
tectures (middleware, models, and domain specific language, etc.) 2007
2008
that can simplify the use of higher-level abstraction requirements
2009 #316
and promote the participation of non-specialist stakeholders, such 2010 #143
as domain experts in the WSN development process. 2011 #216
Meanwhile, the results presented in Table 10 demonstrate that 2012 #22 #15, #292 #28, #157
there are few studies that deal with this issue and none which ad- 2013 #4, #1293 #2,#6,#217
2014 #14,#534
dress more than one high-level aspect in the same proposal. This 2015 #201,#306
indicates possible gaps in the current research that could be fur-
ther explored in order to enhance the support provided by the ap-
proaches for the development of WSN/IoT applications. It is also
interesting to note that of the 15 studies that model some high- some form of control, monitor or concern in reducing the WSN en-
level aspect, only the study conducted by Rodrigues #306 did not ergy consumption. According to the data presented in Table 11, it is
use any sort of IoT-middleware to give support to the treatment of possible to identify that the concern with this aspect only began in
this issue. 2009. Between 2012 and 2013 energy consumption became a con-
cern in an increasing number of selected papers. Table 12 shows
4.1.2. Energy performance concerns (RQ02) the distribution of Energy Performance concern aspects according
We identified that more than half of the selected works (71%) to approach type. It is possible to verify that the increase in in-
did not deploy any kind of energy performance concern, which terest was in the studies using an MDE approach while only #22
means that only 17 (29%) of the 59 approaches deploy or address exploited this aspect with a BPM/BPMN approach.
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71 63

Table 12 Table 13
Distribution of energy performance concerns aspects by type of approach. Distribution of middleware used by type of approach.

Type of approach Studies with energy performance concerns Middleware BPM/BPMN BPMN4WSN MDE

BPM/BPMN #22 Agilla #25,#319

BPMN4WSN #4, #15, #292, #1293 BiSNET #316,#236
MDE #2, #6, #14, #28, #143, #157, #201, #216, #217, #316, DDS #302
#306, #534 Ebbits #56
FamiWare #405
FI-WARE #225
IBM Mote Runner #22
According to Table 12, only 5 studies based on the BPM ap- IoTSys #179
proach present some type of concern with energy consumption. iSense #77,#299
Some of the strategies and relevant aspects used in these studies Jboss ESB #57
are emphasized by Sungur #4. MARINE #201
MARTE #216,#16
One important characteristic that is specific to BPM approaches
MuFFIN #295
is its event-oriented nature. Event-oriented operations commonly OSGi #220
consume less energy than periodic operations due to the fact that PADRES #276
they generate less communication in the WSN. For example, an ap- RTI Connext DDS #366
ScatterWeb #807
plication that periodically notifies other WSN sensors when a door
TinyDDS #6
opens and closes will generate more communication in the WSN
compared to an event-oriented approach which will only commu-
nicate when the specified action occurs. Furthermore, the use of a Table 14
BPM-based approach facilitates the node energy reduction. Annual distribution of service-oriented architecture addressed.
Another strategy is used to activate the node sleep-mode, pri- Type of approach
marily when it is waiting for an event. This reduces considerably
Year BPM/BPMN BPMN4WSN MDE
the energy consumption. The use of parameters related to the time
or frequency of the sleep-mode can make the running of the app 2005
2006
more flexible in relation to the requirements and defined specifi-
2007 #95
cations. 2008 #12
This strategy is also used in studies based on the MDE 2009 #77 #91
approach. Normally, these parameters are related to the non- 2010 #30 #143
2011 #299
functional requirements that are specified in the highest-level
2012 #57 #220,#406
models with the objective of creating a strategy for the low-level 2013 #298
models to be able to generate an application with a lower num- 2014 #158,#383 #110,#225,#918,#534
ber of operations. This, in turn, will permit lower energy consump- 2015 #276,#295 #56,#179,#229,#366
tion. For example, Akbal-Delibas #316 specified non-functional re-
quirements to form clusters to simplify the communication tasks,
control the length of sleep-time to minimize energy consumption,
reported the modeling of more than one high-level aspect at the
group together data to minimize traffic and eliminate redundancy,
same time. This research gap is reinforced by Razzaque et al.
among other strategies.
(2016) who suggests that the middleware is more suitable for ap-
plications requiring a particular high-level aspect (e.g., context-
4.1.3. Use of middleware (RQ03) awareness). Despite this being a focus of Razzaque’s study, context-
Regarding the use of middleware platforms to assist the code awareness, security, privacy and other high-level aspects continue
generation process for WSN/IoT applications, we can observe that to be a challenge for IoT-middleware and requires further research.
a number of studies adopted this alternative in some way. From The proposals that use some type of middleware to support the
the 59 selected papers, 33 (56%) of them use some kind of mid- code-generation process usually need to make several choices. Fac-
dleware support although it was not possible to identify a specific tors such as the type of hardware platform, the application require-
name for some of these middleware. This result is not surprising ments, and the available middleware functions will all affect the
since the code generation process is a complex task that involves proposal as a whole. Thus, a recurring research topic is the search
many stages and technologies. The adoption of middleware solu- for code-generation approaches that are able to use more than one
tions normally occurs when the modeling process focuses on just a type of middleware platform with the development of meta-model
few issues of the code generation process, such as high-level mod- and models that are more flexible and adaptable for different types
eling in BPMN. In these cases, the middleware support is used to of middleware. For example, Rodrigues #201 proposes an MDA ar-
deal with the low-level aspects of code generation, while the re- chitecture artifact to generate flexible middleware configurations in
maining components of the architecture may focus on the higher- order to permit their use in different middleware platforms.
level aspects.
Of the 26 studies that did not use or did not mention any type
of IoT-middleware support, only Ruppen #298 proposed an ap- 4.1.4. Use of service-oriented architecture (RQ04)
proach based on BPM/BPMN. The other studies used an MDE ap- Most approaches, 36 (61%) of 59 selected papers, do not ad-
proach. This is to be expected, given that the MDE architecture is dress any kind of SOA to support the modeling or code generation
the most appropriate for given support to the entire modeling and process. Table 14 shows the annual distribution of Service-Oriented
code generation process without the use of middleware. A large architecture addressed in the selected papers. Table 15 shows the
number of tools and technologies that give support to the code distribution of Service-Oriented architecture addressed by type of
generation process with the use of MDA, make MDE the preferred approach. Upon observing Table 14, it is possible to identify that
choice when any sort of middleware support is adopted. addressing SOA aspects in the approach only began in 2007 and in-
Returning to Table 13, all BPM-based approaches use middle- creased between 2014 and 2015. Furthermore, SOA concerns were
ware to model context-aware aspects, and none of the approaches not addressed in any studies which used a BPMN4WSN approach.
64 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
Table 15
Distribution of service-oriented architecture addressed by type of approach.
Type of approach Studies that address any kind of SOA support
BPM/BPMN #295, #30, #57, #77, #95, #158, #276, #298, #299,
#383
BPMN4WSN
MDE #12, #56, #91, #110, #143, #179, #220, #225, #229,
#366, #406, #534, #918
There is a belief among IT companies that SOA and RESTful ser-
vices in particular can help businesses respond more quickly and
cost-effectively to changing market conditions and yet despite this
only 23 (39%) of the 59 selected papers used SOA architecture. Of
these, just 4 studies – papers #298, 143, #110 and #918 – did not
use a middleware in their proposal, which is somewhat expected
as normally the middleware gives support to communication with
services in the cloud and this is usually done with some kind of
service orientation. Furthermore, of the seven studies that address
context-awareness as a high-level aspect, all use some type of ser-
vice orientation, which suggests that SOA can somehow assist and
facilitate the introduction of context-awareness in cloud-based ser-
vice architectures, which is today one of the distributed computing
paradigm preferred by companies.
As argued by the studies indicated in Table 15, SOA allows for
better integration of smart devices to the WoT (Web of Things)
concept, supporting business applications that are aligned and fol-
low the trend in orchestration based on business process with BPM
software. For example, Domingos #295, proposed a code genera-
tion solution based on a SOA-based middleware where sensed data
are sent via a web service (WS) to the business process application.
Domingos #295 argues that an SOA approach, WS technologies in
particular, makes this integration easier and helps to promote the
decoupling of specific middleware details, allowing the BPM appli-
cation to send and receive data to the WSN without concern for
the specific lower-level details that are responsible for the mid-
dleware. Riedel #143 claims that SOA can be used as a means of
providing flexibility and performance in the modeling of high-level
aspects and proposes an architecture based on MDA and WS gate-
ways that makes it possible to work with different WSN sensor
hardware platforms, separating the low-level from the high-level
concerns.
With the growth in IoT applications, there is a consequent in-
crease in their complexity and diversity. As a result, there is also a
natural tendency for the final applications to migrate to the Cloud,
leaving as little processing as possible in the sensor nodes. There-
fore, it has become common to address SOA in IoT solutions. This
aligns with the recent technological choices made by many com-
panies and the increasing use of SOA/Cloud in their ERP systems.
In summary, SOA architectures should be better exploited by mod-
eling and code generation approaches for WSN/IoT applications as
they facilitate the implementation of high-level aspects and meet
the needs of companies with regards to their business applications.
4.1.5. Dynamic code update deployment (RQ05)
No publications were identified nor was it possible to obtain
any information in the selected papers that provide some kind of
support for dynamic code updating (reprogramming) integrated in
the modeling and code generation process. In this case, to update
the code generated it would be necessary to physically access each
sensor mote to manually deploy reprogramming or use a specific
reprograming technique compatible with the generated code.
There is a lack of studies regarding reprogramming support and
this indicates a research gap that could be better explored with fu-
ture studies in modeling and code-generation or in IoT-middleware
Fig. 2. Annual distribution of the selected papers by source.
which intend to offer reprogramming support. Razzaque et al.
(2016) emphasizes this research gap, indicating that reprogram-
ming is one of the biggest challenges for IoT-middleware.
4.2. Other results
Besides describing the result of each RQ, in the next subsec-
tions we present some relevant statistical research results, such as,
annual distribution of the selected papers by source and approach
type as well as the main languages, frameworks, high-level defini-
tion languages and other technologies used by the selected studies.
4.2.1. Classification by publication year and source
The default settings were used in the search string for each dig-
ital library and the time period was left unmodified. This configu-
ration returned all existing publications from every available year.
As aforementioned, no publications prior to 2004 were returned
as the first version of IEEE.802.15.4 standard was only released in
2003. In the ‘2nd Stage’ (Teixeira et al., 2016) of the conducting
phase only five publications in 2004 were returned, giving a total
of 601 publications.
Fig. 2 presents the annual distribution of the selected papers
sorted at the ‘4th Stage’ by their respective sources. An increase
in the number of publications can be observed in 2009 and 2012
followed by a slight decrease in 2010, 2011 and 2013. In 2014 and
2015, we can observe another increase with an upward trend for
2016.
4.2.2. Classification by type of approach and year
Table 16 presents the annual distribution of the studies classi-
fied by type of approach between 2005 and 2015. From 59 papers,
4 (7%) used the BPMN4WSN, 11 (18%) used the BPM/BPMN and 44
(75%) use the MDE.
Among the selected papers, the MDE was the approach type
which was most commonly used each year with the exception of
2006, following the same rate of growth represented in Fig. 2.
These results are to be expected based on a previous study con-
ducted to define the control papers, and a previous analysis done
with the results obtained by the IEEE Xplore, the first source ana-
lyzed in the beginning of data collection. The results and the anal-
ysis of the selected papers which were obtained with this map-
ping review demonstrate a preference for the MDE approach. This
is understandable, because of the advantages of MDA architec-
tures in facilitating the modeling and code generation process with
an effective and diverse software artifacts repository, plug-ins and
projects make it relative easy to model and generate the WSN node
code. The developer has range of tools with various options for the
entire modeling and code-generation process.
This reinforces the importance and necessity of conducting fur-
ther research into the MDE approaches, exploring the aspects that
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
Table 16
Annual distribution of studies by type of approach.
Year Type of approach
BPM/BPMN BPMN4WSN
2005
2006
2007 #95
2008
2009 #77
2010 #30
2011 #299
2012 #22,#57 #15,#292
2013 #298 #1293,#4
2014 #158,#383
2015 #276, #295
Total 11 4 44
(18,64%) (6,77%)
could contribute to and facilitate the modeling and code genera-
tion process even further. At the same time, conducting further re-
search into the aspects which stand out and are in growing de-
mand in the business context. In this way, it is important to ob-
serve trends of the technologies and architectures that are being
used in the business environment. For example, the use of BPM
software to aid decision making has increased greatly in the last
few years, forcing the development of BP software to propose so-
lutions that meet these new demands from companies (Fleming,
M., Silverstein, 2015). According to a study by IDC, this is expected
to experience growth in the coming years as companies become
increasingly interested in optimizing and automating their busi-
ness processes (Glaz et al., 2015). Considering this, BPM/BPMN ap-
proaches stand out and should be the focus of new studies given
that they are totally aligned with the demands and strategic busi-
ness decisions, mainly with high-level modeling aspects because
BPM/BPMN is an alternative for high-level graphic modeling for the
development of WSN applications.
The increase of studies based on BPM/BPMN approaches peaks
in 2012, coinciding with the onset of publications with propos-
als based on BPMN4WSN from the makeSense group. The growth
from 2012 also coincides with an increase in news predicting the
growth of the IoT. It is important to state that many publications
based on BPM/BPMN/BPMN4WSN are business-oriented studies. Of
the 15 studies, 7 (46%) have co-authors linked to research cen-
ters from big companies such as SAP (with 6 studies #298, #95,
#15, #292, #4 and #1293) and IBM (study #22). The approaches
based on BPMN4WSN propose an extension of the BPMN standard
with element modifications to its meta-model so that they become
more appropriate for the modeling and integration of the BPMN
with the IoT. These approaches are all linked to the group/project
makeSense and present the advantage of permitting the modeling
of IoT applications that can be done with a high-level graphic lan-
guage. However, they require the adaptation of existing BMP tools
and demand that the participants involved in the process have a
command of both BPMN and knowledge of basic WSN. This spe-
cific combination of skills and knowledge is rare to find in today’s
market.
We identified research projects that investigate ways to inte-
grate business architectures with IoT. The European project Inter-
net of Things Architecture (IoT-A) (“Internet of Things - Architec-
ture,” 2016) is one example. IoT-A is a collaborative project in-
volving large software and technology companies and universities.
They have proposed the Architectural Reference Model (ARM) and
a set of key building blocks that should provide the foundation for
the development of the emerging IoT. For a deeper understand-
ing of the issues related to the BPMN adaptations and extensions,
which better meet the IoT requirements for the BPMN notation,
65
MDE
#882
#286,#472
#12
#91,#807,#316,#334,#446
#236,#143,#302,#442
#230,#234,#216
#28,#157,#220,#406, #405,#403,#258
#2,#6,#25,#217
#14,#16,#110,#534,#225, #918,#319,#373
#7,#56,#229,#201,#179, #185,#306,#362,#366
(74,57%)
IoT-A Deliverables could be consulted (“Internet of Things - Archi-
tecture,” 2016).
4.2.3. Classification and quantitative analysis by languages and
technologies supporting the modeling and code generation process
In order to facilitate the analysis of this topic, it has been bro-
ken down into subtopics to facilitate the process of analysis and
classification that continues below.
4.2.3.1. Languages, protocols, standards and technologies. There are
many options of languages and technologies in the entire model-
ing and code generation process. Table 17 presents the most com-
monly used languages and technologies that influence the entire
architecture and the code generation process.
From the results presented in Table 17, it is possible to verify
the preference for “Eclipse” (2016). Its wide range of possibilities,
including new plug-ins, diverse resources and features, make it a
user-friendly and suitable environment for supporting the model-
ing and code generation process. For example, the ATL, Acceleo,
oAW and jBPM are projects that are available as an Eclipse plug-in.
The openArchitectureWare (oAW) (Voelter, 2006) is a java-based
suite of tools and components to build MDA models, metamodels
and code formats. The studies that opted to use oAW did so from
a PSM model to generate the node code with validation checking.
Today, the “Xtext - Language engineering for everyone”
(2016) framework is the next evolutionary step of oAW. The jBPM
is a java-based framework and has a workflow engine for modeling
and process automation in BPMN (“jBPM,” 2015). The jBPM based
studies use this system to integrate IoT with BP through a BPMN.
The “Signavio” (2015) is a web-based editor and workflow for the
modeling and process automation in BPMN. Signavio was mainly
used in studies linked to the MakeSense group (Tranquillini et al.,
2012). This is due to the fact that it is an open-source tool pro-
viding support for the use of BPMN4WSN or some kind of BPMN
extension. One of the main goals of these studies is to propose
a model-to-macrocode transformation for facilitating the develop-
ment of an IoT solution.
RESTful, WSDL, SOAP and JSON are used to support some kind
of SOA architecture to assist the use of decoupling services to de-
ploy part of the IoT solution in a server or a cloud service. For ex-
ample, Vujovic #110, proposed a WS RESTful to receive data from
the sensor nodes via HTTP protocol. The BPEL was chosen in some
studies to execute the integration between IoT and BP.
4.2.3.2. High-level modeling language. The most common high-level
languages identified were UML, EMF Ecore (Meta-modeling) and
BPMN respectively. The works #472, #316, #28, #258, #366, #179
use the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to specify some kind
66 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71

Table 17
Distribution of the most commonly used languages and technologies by type of approach.

Commonly used languages Type of approach

and technologies

BPM/ BPMN BPMN4WSN MDE

Eclipse (26) #77,#158,#383 #234,#25,#179,#334,#316, #110,#302,#143,#534,

#258, #185,#230,#286,#472,#807,
#12,#406,#7,#14,#2,#201, #306, #918
Java (10) #95,#30, #57 #234,#56,#534,#366, #362,#405,#373
ATL (8) #14,#201,#306,#185,#230,#286,#472,#7
Acceleo (8) #14,#2,#918,#25,#185, #230,#406,#7
RESTful (5) #298,#276 #110,#406,#229
HTTP (5) #276 #143,#225,#229,#373
Signavio (5) #298 #292,#4,
#15,
#1293
oAW (4) #316,#302,#807,#12
JSON (4) #298 #918,#225,#373
SOAP (3) #299 #56,#143
WSDL (3) #383,#299 #143
jBPM (3) #57,#295, #276
BPEL (3) #158,#299,#383

Table 18
Annual distribution of high level modeling languages.

High-level modeling languages 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

UML #286 #12 #807#334 #442 #216 #15, #405 #1293 #217 #16 #366#201#306
#472 #316 #236 #403 #258 #25 #534
#143 #6
#302
EMF Ecore (meta modeling) #286 #12 #446 #236, #143 #234 #28, #403 #25 #14 #366
#316 #302 #230 #258 #110 #179
#918 #185 #229
#7
BPM/BPMN #30 #299 #22 #298 #383 #276
#57 #158 #295
BPMN4 #292 #15 #1293
WSN #4
SysML #157 #2
GWELS #77
XMLVM #95
SAML #28
fUML #319
SSML #406
SAL #362
VRDK #882

of constraints on the metamodel elements for setting restrictions
and avoiding ambiguity. For example, in #316 the models are val-
idated with some OCL constraints in order to be checked against
the model. Table 18 presents the annual distribution of high-level
modeling languages and Fig. 3 shows the percentage of use for
each high-level modeling language used. With the exception of
the most commonly used languages such as UML, EMF Ecore,
BPM/BPMN and BPMN4WSN, the remaining studies propose other
languages, with the majority being UML extensions.
The UML and EMF Ecore (meta-modeling) high-level languages
are the mostly used by MDE approaches, except in #15 and #1293
that uses BPMN4WSN approach. Table 19 presents the distribution
of the most commonly used high-level modeling languages by type
of approach.
4.2.3.3. Node programming language, OS system, platform or simula-
tor. Among the results analyzed and available in the spreadsheet,
it is possible to highlight from the 59 selected papers, only 25 re-
port the OS used on the nodes. “TinyOS” (2016) was used by 16
and “Contiki” (2016) was used by 10 works. Other works use a dif-
ferent OS type such as “Sun SPOT World” (2016), EPOS #16 and
iSense #299. With regards to the platform or simulator, 20 works
report the use of some kind of platform (MicaZ (MEMSIC, 2016),
IRIS, TelosB, “Arduino” (2016), SunSPOT, “Raspberry pi” (2016), etc)
or simulator (e.g., TOSSIM) (Levis et al., 2009). More details are
available in the spreadsheet (Teixeira et al., 2016) that contains all
results.
5. Conclusions
The view of a world flooded with smart objects present in our
daily lives in a transparent and autonomous way is nothing new.
Weiser (1991) published his famous article entitled “The computer
of the 21st century”, in the Scientific American, which spoke of a
ubiquitous computing scenario in which smart objects were able
to offer people services to facilitate their lives. It is not unsound to
say that the Internet of Things is materializing Weiser’s vision.
In academia and the IDC (2015), (Liu and Yu, 2013; Malavolta
and Muccini, 2014; Razzaque et al., 2016), market research has
been indicating an increasing interest in the IoT domain. The re-
sults of the annual distribution of selected papers, as shown in
Fig. 3, corroborates this statement. Based on the evaluation of data
available on the ’2nd Stage’ tab of the spreadsheet (Teixeira et al.,
2016) containing the search results, it is possible to identify a vir-
tually uniform growth in publications from 2004 to 2015, even be-
fore applying any filter. Results of a survey conducted in 2015 by
 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71 67

Table 19
Distribution of the most commonly used high-level modeling languages by type of approach.

High-level modeling Type of approach

languages BPM/BPMN BPMN4WSN MDE

UML #15,#1293 #12,#286,#472,#807,#334,#442,#236,#216,#405,

#403,#258,#217,#25,#16,
#366,#201,#306,#143,#302,#316,#534
EMF Ecore (Meta-modeling) #286,#12,#446,#236,#234,#230,#28,#403,#258,
#25,#14,#110,#918,#179,
#185,#229, #143,#302,#316,#366
BPM/BPMN #30,#299,#22,
#57,#298,#383,#158,#276,
#295
BPMN4WSN #292,#15, #1293,#4
SysML #157,#2
GWELS #77
XMLVM #95
SAML #28
fUML #319
SSML #406
SAL #362
VRDK #882

specifically designed to deal with high-level aspects such as QoS,

Fig. 3. Percentage of high-level modeling languages used by the selected papers.
the IDC indicates that the IoT market will grow to an estimated
$ 1.7 trillion in 2020, with an annual growth rate of 16.9% (IDC,
2015).
In contrast with this predicted growth, Cisco estimates a deficit
of 8.2% in 2022 for the professionals of the Information and Com-
munication Technology (ICT) market and indicates the need for
training professionals with different profiles who are capable of
working with the IoT, especially considering that developing IoT
solutions is still a complex task that requires the participation of
multidisciplinary teams (Fator Brasil, 2013). Therefore, it is rele-
vant and necessary to search of ways to facilitate the modeling and
code generation process for professionals who do not have low-
level programming skills. In this way, it will be easier to meet the
growing demand for the development of IoT solutions.
The research gap identified in this study indicates the need for
the development of architectures that simplify the code-generation
process and at the same time facilitate the participation of various
stakeholder, with freedom to conceive or utilize final applications
without having to worry about lower-level details characterized by
the WSN/IoT objects.
There were various existing research gaps identified by this
study. For example, modeling abstractions and methodologies
QoC, semantic support, privacy and security are still missing in cur-
rent approaches, at least in an integrated way.
Another issue highlighted in this study is that none of the se-
lected works supports a dynamic code update. As discussed in
Section 2.3.5, the increase in the complexity and the dynamic be-
havior of the WSN/IoT applications make code updating after its
deployment a relevant requirement. Thus, alternatives for repro-
gramming the nodes in WSN/IoT applications such as proposed by
Branco et al. (2015) should be taken into consideration during the
code generation process.
The capacity to provide flexibility or decoupling in the WSN/IoT
solution during the development and execution of the final appli-
cation is another important aspect that should become increasingly
relevant in the coming years. This tendency is perfectly aligned
with the Business IT model adopted in the corporate environment.
The increasing need for company competitiveness and frequent
changes in the demands of the applications, has created the need
to develop ways to interoperate with heterogeneous systems. Both
Cloud computing and SOA offer an effective way to support het-
erogeneous systems which interoperate and are increasingly incor-
porated into the set of technologies, methods and practices used
to build support infrastructures for the WSN/IoT.
In particular, the development of approaches and code-
generation architectures that are capable of addressing SOA and
Cloud, aligned with the use of Web technology as a base for de-
scriptive and semantic enrichment of the data, helping to pro-
mote the interoperability and flexibility and decoupling between
the low-level WSN/IoT platform details and the final applications.
This is an important research gap that should be explored by ex-
perts in the area in the next few years.
It should also be noted that, historically, business solutions de-
veloped by large hardware and software providers tend to create
new demands for other large clients and the ICT market in general.
Therefore, to a certain extent, the growth of the interest and re-
search on WSN/IoT applications has also been influenced by these
big players. This study has shown that large ERP and BPM software
vendors, like SAP (“SAP IoT Connects the World to Enable Live Busi-
ness.,” 2016) and IBM, have particular interest in specific platforms
that integrate IoT to their own BPM systems or Enterprise architec-
ture, with the purpose of adding value to their business processes.
This is a trend that will be followed by other major software com-
panies.
68 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71
The results of the study show a predominance of code-
generation proposals based on MDE approaches. This should con-
tinue increasing, considering its advantages and appropriate char-
acteristics for WSN application code-generation as well as the vast
support provided by familiar frameworks, such as Eclipse, which
facilitates the work of whoever wishes to develop application with
an MDE approach. It is no coincidence that Table 17-new indicates
a preference for the use of Eclipse. In contrast, there is also an
increasing demand for applications that are able to integrate into
a heterogeneous corporate environment. Thus aligning the use of
MDE approaches with the enterprise architectures, with the aim of
favoring the interoperability of WSN/IoT and the business applica-
tion directed to BPM, ERP and other legacy systems is a continual
challenge for researchers.
As presented in Section 4.1.3, 56% of the selected papers made
use of some IoT-middleware to support the code generation pro-
cess. In general, adopting a middleware simplifies the application
development process as the lower-level details can be hidden and
dealt with in this additional layer. Meanwhile, in the context of
WSN/IoT applications it is important to verify if the conceptual ar-
chitecture of the middleware permits the interoperability with the
BPM enterprise architectures. This study shows that flexible IoT
middleware that is aligned to enterprise architecture is still an im-
portant research gap.
We believe that the discussions and results of the presented
here in this review raise relevant questions regarding automatic
code generation for WSN/IoT applications of which could still be
more thoroughly investigated with additional mapping or system-
atic reviews. As previously highlighted, all the results of this study
can be consulted in the spreadsheet (Teixeira et al., 2016).
Acknowledgments
The first author acknowledges CAPES (Process: 9 96325252) for
the financial grant. Our gratitude goes to Ricardo de Almeida Falbo,
who made important contributions to the methodology and Sys-
tematic Mapping protocols used in this Systematic Mapping Study.
Finally, a special thanks to Claire Henderson Venables, the enthu-
siastic language teacher who reviewed the English.
Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be
found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.jss.2017.06.024.
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 S. Teixeira et al. / The Journal of Systems and Software 132 (2017) 50–71 71

Sergio Teixeira is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), in Vitória, Brazil. He received a post-graduate degree in Computer
Networks in 1997 and went on to complete a M.Sc. in 2005, also at UFES. His research interests include computer networks, wireless sensor networks, Situation-aware and
Business-aware computing and the Internet of Things. He has 16 years’ experience in academia and 30 years in Computer Science, working mainly in the area of Networks
and Enterprise. He is a lecturer at the Catholic University of Brasilia (UCB) and the Catholic University Center of Vitória (UCV).

Bruno Alves Agrizzi is a Computer Science M.Sc. candidate at Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), in Vitória, Brazil. He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science
from UFES in 2016. His research interests include computer networks, wireless sensor networks, situation-aware, business-aware computing and Internet of Things.

José Gonçalves Pereira Filho is a Full Professor at Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), in Vitória, Brazil. He received his D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from University
of São Paulo (USP) in 1996. Part of the doctoral research was developed at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, in multimedia systems. He held a
postdoctoral position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EWI) of the University of Twente, in Enschede, The Netherlands, from
Oct-2002 to Sep-2003 and from Sep-2014 to Aug-2015 (SCS Research Group). His research interests include computer networks, wireless sensor networks, context-aware
computing and Internet of Things.

Silvana Rossetto received her PhD in Computer Science from Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in 2006. She holds the position of Associate Professor at the
Computer Science Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she teaches for undergraduate courses and works as a
researcher. Her current areas of interest are distributed and parallel systems and wireless sensor networks.

Roquemar de Lima Baldam received his M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil in 2003 and his PhD degree in 2008,
also at UFRJ. He has practical experience with process, projects, Business Process Management (BPM) and Knowledge Management in private and public organizations. He is
a lecturer at the Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES), in Vitória, Brazil.