Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have found more and more applications in a variety of pervasive computing environments. However, how to support the development, maintenance, deployment and execution of applications over WSNs remains to be a nontrivial and challenging task, mainly because of the gap between the high level requirements from pervasive computing applications and the underlying operation of WSNs. Middleware for WSN can help bridge the gap and remove impediments. In recent years, research has been carried out on WSN middleware from different aspects and for different purposes. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing work on WSN middleware, seeking for a better understanding of the current issues and future directions in this field. We propose a reference framework to analyze the functionalities of WSN middleware in terms of the system abstractions and the services provided. We review the approaches and techniques for implementing the services. On the basis of the analysis and by using a feature tree, we provide taxonomy of the features of WSN middleware and their relationships, and use the taxonomy to classify and evaluate existing work. We also discuss open problems in this important area of research.

This survey reviews the recent development of gradient domain mesh deformation method. Different to other deformation methods, the gradient domain deformation method is a surface-based, variational optimization method. It directly encodes the geometric details in differential coordinates, which are also called Laplacian coordinates in literature. By preserving the Laplacian coordinates, the mesh details can be well preserved during deformation. Due to the locality of the Laplacian coordinates, the variational optimization problem can be casted into a sparse linear system. Fast sparse linear solver can be adopted to generate deformation result interactively, or even in real-time. The nonlinear nature of gradient domain mesh deformation leads to the development of two categories of deformation methods: linearization methods and nonlinear optimization methods. Basically, the linearization methods only need to solve the linear least-squares system once. They are fast, easy to understand and control, while the deformation result might be suboptimal. Nonlinear optimization methods can reach optimal solution of deformation energy function by iterative updating. Since the computation of nonlinear methods is expensive, reduced deformable models should be adopted to achieve interactive performance. The nonlinear optimization methods avoid the user burden to input transformation at deformation handles, and they can be extended to incorporate various nonlinear constraints, like volume constraint, skeleton constraint, and so on. We review representative methods and related approaches of each category comparatively and hope to help the user understand the motivation behind the algorithms. Finally, we discuss the relation between physical simulation and gradient domain mesh deformation to reveal why it can achieve physically plausible deformation result.