Usage and Operation of Wireless Sensor Network Testbeds

Recently, experimentally-driven research has become an instrumental tool in designing and optimizing novel networking applications. While simulations are still important tools, they suffer from several imperfections as they make artificial assumptions on radio propagation, traffic, failure patterns, and topologies. Especially in the domain of wireless sensor networks, which are embedded into the environment, applications strongly depend on real-world processes that are often a result of complex interactions and are extremely difficult to model accurately. In order to design robust applications, developers need appropriate tools and methods for testing and managing their applications on real hardware in large-scale deployments. Such tools have been developed by the EUproject WISEBED [Sev08], which provides methods to cope with implementing protocols and applications for heterogeneous networks (cf. Chapter 2.0) as well as an ecosystem of testbeds and accompanying software for conducting experiments.

This chapter introduces the latter and describes requirements for testbeds and WISEBED’s architecture (cf. Section 9.2), how to run experiments (cf. Section 9.3), and briefly how to operate testbeds using the WISEBED software (cf. Section 9.4). Section 9.5 concludes this chapter.