Braceforce: a middleware enabling novice programmers to integrate sensing in CPS applications

Even as the use of sensor networks to support CPS applications grows, our ability to seamlessly and efficiently incorporate sensor network capabilities remains astoundingly difficult. Today, accessing remote sensing data and integrating this data into the adaptive behavior of a dynamic user-facing CPS application requires interacting with multiple sensor platform languages, data formats, and communication channels and paradigms. We present BraceForce, an open and extensible middleware that allows developers to access the myriad remote sensing capabilities inherent to cyber-physical systems using very minimal code. Further, BraceForce incorporates eventand model-driven data acquisition as firstclass concepts to provide efficient access to sensing while retaining expressiveness and flexibility for applications. This paper presents the BraceForce middleware architecture and key abstractions, describes their implementations, and provides an empirical study using BraceForce to support CPS applications.