One unfortunate consequence of the success story of wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) in separate research communities is an ever-growing gap between theory
and practice. Even though there is a increasing number of algorithmic methods
for WSNs, the vast majority has never been tried in practice; conversely, many
practical challenges are still awaiting efficient algorithmic solutions. The
main cause for this discrepancy is the fact that programming sensor nodes still
happens at a very technical level. We remedy the situation by introducing
Wiselib, our algorithm library that allows for simple implementations of
algorithms onto a large variety of hardware and software. This is achieved by
employing advanced C++ techniques such as templates and inline functions,
allowing to write generic code that is resolved and bound at compile time,
resulting in virtually no memory or computation overhead at run time.

The Wiselib runs on different host operating systems, such as Contiki, iSense
OS, and ScatterWeb. Furthermore, it runs on virtual nodes simulated by Shawn.
For any algorithm, the Wiselib provides data structures that suit the specific
properties of the target platform. Algorithm code does not contain any
platform-specific specializations, allowing a single implementation to run
natively on heterogeneous networks.

In this paper, we describe the building blocks of the Wiselib, and analyze
the overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing how
routing algorithms can be implemented. We also report on results from
experiments with real sensor-node hardware.