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Grace: low-cost time-synchronized GPIO tracing for IoT testbeds
Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Date Issued
2022-01-01
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Start Page
9
End Page
16
Citation
Proceedings - 18th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOSS 2022: 9-16
Contribution to Conference
Publisher DOI
Scopus ID
Publisher
IEEE
ISBN
978-1-6654-9512-7
978-1-6654-9513-4
Testbeds have become a vital tool for evaluating and benchmarking applications and algorithms in the Internet of Things (IoT). Testbeds commonly consist of low-power IoT de-vices augmented with observer nodes providing control, logging, and often also power-profiling. Today, the research community operates numerous testbeds, sometimes with hundreds of IoT nodes, to allow for detailed and large-scale evaluation. Most testbeds, however, lack opportunities for tracing distributed program execution with high accuracy in time, for example, via minimally invasive, distributed GPIO tracing. And the ones that do, like Flocklab, are built from custom hardware, which is often too complex, inflexible, or expensive to use for other research groups. This paper closes this gap and introduces Grace, a low-cost, retrofittable, distributed, and time-synchronized GPIO tracing system built from off-the-shelf components, costing less than €20 per node. Grace extends observer nodes in a testbed with (1) time-synchronization via wireless sub-GHz transceivers and (2) logic analyzers for GPIO tracing and logging, enabling time-synchronized GPIO tracing at a frequency of up to 8 MHz. We deploy Grace in a testbed and show that it achieves an average time synchronization error between nodes of 1.53 µs.
Subjects
GPIO Logging | GPIO Tracing | Internet of Things | IoT | Testbed | Time-Synchronization
DDC Class
600: Technology