Poster abstract: Balancing visibility and resource consumption for long-term monitoring of sensornets

Limited visibility of node states makes debugging deployed sensor networks very difficult. Higher visibility usually implies more resource consumption. As sensor networks are resource-constrained and need to operate unattended for long periods, a balance between a sufficient level of visibility and a tolerable consumption of resources needs to be found so that enough evidence can be collected to analyze the causes of observed problems. We propose a mechanism called visibility levels (vLevels) to manage the trade-off between visibility and resource consumption. Preliminary experimental results show the feasibility of vLevels.