Practical monitoring and analysis tool for WSN testing

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) comprise autonomous embedded nodes that combine sensing, actuation, and distributed computing with small size and low energy. Testing of WSNs is challenging due to distributed functionality, lack of test and debug interfaces, and limited communication, computation and memory resources. This paper presents the design and implementation of a practical network monitoring and analysis tool for identifying the causes of misbehavior. The tool consists of a sniffer node that passively captures WSN traffic, and multiple user interfaces that can run e.g. on a PC or mobile phone. Unlike the related proposals, our tool neither needs setting up an additional monitoring network alongside the actual WSN nor uses any node resources. Practical testing experiences with mul-tihop mesh WSN deployments show that the tool reveals design and implementation defects that are hard to discover with other testing methods such as in-network monitoring systems or debug prints.