Lightweight tracing for wireless sensor networks debugging

  • Authors:

  • Vinaitheerthan Sundaram;Patrick Eugster;Xiangyu Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana;Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana;Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Middleware Tools, Services and Run-Time Support for Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being increasingly deployed in the real world to monitor the environment and large industrial infrastructures. The extreme resource constraints inherent to WSNs, the in situ deployment in harsh environments and the lack of run-time support tools make debugging and maintaining WSN applications very challenging. In particular, run-time debugging tools are required to detect and diagnose complex run-time faults such as race-conditions, which occur due to unexpected interaction with the real-world environment. The ability to repeatedly reproduce the failure by replaying the execution from the trace of events that took place can play a crucial role in debugging such faults. Obtaining such a trace is made difficult due to tight resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tracing tool for WSNs which uses a novel control flow tracing and encoding scheme to generate a highly compressed control-flow trace. In addition to the construction of the trace, our tracing tool supports storing the trace in non-volatile memory and querying interface that allows base station to retrieve the trace when needed. We show the effectiveness of our tracing tool through a case-study and illustrate its low overhead through measurements.