The development of embedded systems challenges software engineers with timely delivery of optimised code that is both safe and resource-aware. Within this context, we focus on distributed systems with small, specialised node hardware, specifically, wireless sensor network (WSN) systems. Model-driven software development (MDSD) promises to reduce errors and efforts needed for complex software projects by automated code generation from abstract software models. We present an approach for MDSD based on the data-centric OMG middleware standard DDS. In this paper, we argue that the combination of DDS features and MDSD can successfully be applied to WSN systems, and we present the design of an appropriate approach, describing an architecture, metamodels and the design workflow. Finally, we present a prototypical implementation of our approach using a WSN-enabled DDS implementation and a set of modelling and transformation tools from the Eclipse Modeling Framework.