Sensei-uu: a relocatable sensor network testbed

• Authors: Olof Rensfelt;Frederik Hermans;Lars-Åke Larzon;Per Gunningberg
• Venue: Proceedings of the fifth ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation and characterization
• Year: 2010

A testbed is a powerful complement to simulation and emulation for evaluation of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. However, testbeds tend to be limited to lab environments and tightly coupled to specific hardware and sensor OS configurations. These limitations, in addition to dependency on local infrastructure make it hard to evaluate applications on actual hardware in the intended target environment. We introduce Sensei-UU, a WSN testbed designed to be easily relocatable between different physical environments and not tightly dependent on specific sensor hardware or OS. The ability to relocate the testbed enables users to evaluate WSN applications in their intended target environments. The wide range of supported sensor node platforms allows users to evaluate heterogeneous applications. Sensei-UU achieves its flexibility by following a distributed design in which control functionality is put on control machines close to the sensor nodes, and by using a wireless control channel. We have run experiments to ensure that our wireless control channel does not interfere with the WSN application under evaluation. We show that Sensei-UU can be relocated between environments and that seemingly similar physical locations can have a large difference in radio environment. These differences between locations motivate the need for relocatable testbeds like Sensei-UU