Increasing the reliability of wireless sensor networks with a distributed testing framework

ABSTRACT

Designing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has proven to be a slow, tedious and error-prone process due to the inherent intricacies of designing a distributed, wireless, and embedded system. A systematic design approach accompanied by a test methodology supports the development of WSN software conforming to all design requirements including robustness and reliability. In this paper, we propose the fundamentals of such a test methodology. We present essential features of a framework for testing a broad range of WSN applications. We demonstrate with a case study that our test methodology is a feasible approach by integrating a number of existing design-tools for the TinyOS operating system. While we target TinyOS in the case study the proposed test methodology is general and not tailored to a specific WSN platform or operating system.

REFERENCES

• 1: E. Cheong, E. Lee, and Y. Zhao. Joint modeling and design of wireless networks and sensor node software. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2006-150, Nov. 2006.
• 2: J. Choi, J. Lee, M. Wachs, and P. Levis. Opening the sensornet black box. Technical Report SING-06-03, Stanford Information Networks Group, Stanford University, CA, 2006.
• 3: M. Dyer, J. Beutel, L. Thiele, T. Kalt, P. Oehen, K. Martin, and P. Blum. Deployment support network - a toolkit for the development of WSNs. In Proc. 4th European Workshop on Sensor Networks (EWSN 2007), volume 4373 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 195--211. Springer, Berlin, Jan. 2007.
• 4: David Gay , Philip Levis , Robert von Behren , Matt Welsh , Eric Brewer , David Culler, The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 5: Lewis Girod , Jeremy Elson , Alberto Cerpa , Thanos Stathopoulos , Nithya Ramanathan , Deborah Estrin, EmStar: a software environment for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.24-24, June 27-July 02, 2004, Boston, MA
• 6: Tian He , Sudha Krishnamurthy , Liqian Luo , Ting Yan , Lin Gu , Radu Stoleru , Gang Zhou , Qing Cao , Pascal Vicaire , John A. Stankovic , Tarek F. Abdelzaher , Jonathan Hui , Bruce Krogh, VigilNet: An integrated sensor network system for energy-efficient surveillance, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), v.2 n.1, p.1-38, February 2006 [doi>10.1145/1138127.1138128]
• 7: Oliver Kasten , Kay Römer, Beyond event handlers: programming wireless sensors with attributed state machines, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks, April 24-27, 2005, Los Angeles, California
• 8: Philip Levis , Nelson Lee , Matt Welsh , David Culler, TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958506]
• 9: Nithya Ramanathan , Kevin Chang , Rahul Kapur , Lewis Girod , Eddie Kohler , Deborah Estrin, Sympathy for the sensor network debugger, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098946]
• 10: M. Ringwald and K. Römer. Passive inspection of sensor networks. In Proc. 3rd IEEE Int'l Conf. on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2007), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, June 2007.
• 11: Geoffrey Werner-Allen , Patrick Swieskowski , Matt Welsh, MoteLab: a wireless sensor network testbed, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks, April 24-27, 2005, Los Angeles, California
• 12: Kamin Whitehouse , Gilman Tolle , Jay Taneja , Cory Sharp , Sukun Kim , Jaein Jeong , Jonathan Hui , Prabal Dutta , David Culler, Marionette: using RPC for interactive development and debugging of wireless embedded networks, Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Information processing in sensor networks, April 19-21, 2006, Nashville, Tennessee, USA [doi>10.1145/1127777.1127840]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

Keywords:
reliability, testing, wireless sensor networks