Demo Abstract: Fast Implementation and Deployment of Small-Size Wireless Sensor Networks Anna F¨orster University of Lugano, Faculty of Informatics, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland,
[email protected]
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Introduction
Performance evaluation of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications is usually a 5-step process, starting with theory, going through simulation and testbed evaluation and ending with deployment prototypes and the final deployment. While the overall approach is well-designed and guarantees testing in various environments, its current implementation practice is not ideal. Main problems are missing code portability and high implementation costs of experimental testbeds. This demonstration shows how to solve these problems with Atelier-2: a lightweight and platform independent software architecture, designed to support the implementation and deployment of WSN testbeds. Atelier-2 supports both layered and cross-layered communication stacks and allows code transfer among various hardware platforms, operating systems and simulators. We will show how to use Atelier-2 to quickly design, implement and deploy a sample experimental testbed for evaluating several neighborhood management protocols.
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System Architecture Overview
The main goal of Atelier-2 is to enable fast design and deployment of smallsize, infrastructure-less WSN testbeds. For example, testing several routing or MAC protocols can be significantly simplified by using the already available Atelier-2 components and re-using code from previous experiments or simulations. This goal is achieved with platform-independence and flexible modularity. The overall system architecture of Atelier-2 is depicted in Figure 1. Its main components are Layer-s, LayerManager and HardwareInterface. Any communication protocol, algorithm or application must implement the Layer interface in order to be able to communicate with other Layer-s and the hosting platform. The Layer-s are indirectly connected to each other through the LayerManager. It holds a simple data structure describing the current communication stack used for relying messages to adjacent Layer-s. HardwareInterface is the only platform-dependent component, which translates Atelier-2 code and executes it on the hosting platform (an operating system, a firmware or a simulator). Atelier-2 is available for download1 and an extensive evaluation and description is available in [1]. 1
www.sensorlab.inf.usi.ch
ATELIER-2
AtelierPacket
Layer Layer Layer
LayerManager
sendUp
init Shared Info
stop
sendDown
comm_stack
recFromUp recFromDown
init
HardwareInterface
add/remove send/rec Timer packets
radio on/off
get/set Time
logEvent callbacks
(a) (b) Fig. 1. (a) Atelier-2’s system architecture and (b) the demo platform MSB430.
In addition to the general architecture, Atelier-2 provides some useful components, which enable changing the communication stack during run-time, as well as remote management of the nodes over the air. Atelier-2 enables fast and easy deployment and subsequent data gathering without the need of an infrastructure or any further additional costs.
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Demonstration Goals
There are three main goals of our Atelier-2 demonstration: first, we would like to show the audience that implementing on real hardware can be relatively simple and very satisfying, thus encouraging especially young researchers to turn to real hardware evaluations instead of pure simulations. Second, we want to increase the visibility of our newly developed platform architecture and to show its properties and advantages. Last but not least, we want to foster collaboration and code sharing and discuss the further development of Atelier-2.
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Demonstration Overview
The demonstration will include several steps: design, implementation, deployment and data processing. We will use Scatterweb’s MSB430 [2] sensor nodes as hosting platform. Our sample scenario assumes that we want to implement and evaluate the work of a new neighborhood management protocol. For organizational reasons we will keep the complexity of the on-site implementation low to enable the audience to follow the complete process in a short amount of time. During the demo, we will implement the desired neighborhood management protocol, will use existing components and layers to construct a full communication stack for our testbed, will program the nodes and deploy them in a random (or audience-driven) way. We will show how to remotely control the nodes and change the communication stack during run-time and at the end of the experiment we will gather the on-node log data to process offline.
References 1. F¨ orster, A.: ATELIER-2: A Flexible Lightweight Software Architecture for Testing Wireless Sensor Networks. conference paper in review (2010) 2. Scatterweb Inc.: http://www.scatterweb.de/
