Tubicles: Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Nodes - Testbed Objectives and Assembly Instructions
Key: RHG+08-1
Author: Andreas Reinhardt, Jan Hennecke, Steffen Gottwald, Matthias Kropff, Johannes Schmitt, Matthias Hollick, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: December 2008
Kind: @techreport
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network Testbed, Deployment Support Network
Abstract: Real sensor network deployments often exhibit characteristics that significantly differ from simulations. Various factors are known to have an impact on application behavior, including real radio characteristics, sensor readings, and timing constraints. Incomplete or stochastic models employed in current simulation utilities do not cover these aspects in their entirety, possibly leading to a limited applicability of the results. A feasible approach to address this problem is the deployment of a testbed and the evaluation of applications on real sensor node hardware. Testbeds can provide different means of developer support, ranging from extensive logging and deployment support to pure ad hoc node deployments with barely any assistance to the user. The demand for heterogeneity in various dimensions also becomes increasingly important, and similarly considering mobile and moving nodes becomes a major issue to evaluate user-centric applications and algorithms, i.e. applications focussing on monitoring persons instead of environmental parameters. The analysis and verification process of smart applications, i.e. applications that dynamically adapt to arising requirements during runtime, poses additional constraints on the testbed. Taking these desired features into account, we have elaborated a set of design requirements for a heterogeneous sensor network testbed suited to evaluate the behavior of smart applications. Apart from sophisticated support during deployment and experiment runtime, our testbed has been designed to provide versatility in terms of heterogeneity, portability, mobility, and application debugging support. These means prevent the testbed from being confined to a small subset of application domains. In this paper, we present the tubicle node platform, a heterogenous sensor node forming the basic component of our TWiNS.KOM testbed. Heterogeneous in terms of computational power, available memory, radio protocols, and sensing capabilities, the platform allows to analyze the impact of heterogeneity on applications. The support for portability allows to relocate nodes easily, an essential prerequisite to perform experiments in situ. The capability of integrating mobile sensors, and the versatile debugging and deployment support, are further assets of our platform. This technical report presents profound details on the selected hardware and software components, and provides detailed information about the process of assembly and programming of the nodes. Binary distributions of the presented software bundles are available for download on the testbed website.
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