Minimising the entry effort in experimenting with WSN testbeds to perform heterogeneous research

Start Page
19
End Page
22
Citation
ACM Workshop on Real World Wireless Sensor Networks : 19-22 (2015-11-01)
Contribution to Conference
6th ACM Workshop on Real World Wireless Sensor Networks, RealWSN 2015  
Publisher DOI
10.1145/2820990.2820995
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84957694022
Publisher
ACM
Testbeds play a crucial role in evaluating novel protocols, algorithms, and applications in controlled, but realistic envi-ronments. These testbeds are mainly used by researchers to realize diverse application environments, which are not real-istic to be achieved in simulated environments (e.g., lossy channels in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)). Most re-searchers, especially bachelor or master students spend a large portion of their time familiarizing themselves and set-ting up test beds before performing the actual research work. This portion of time, when considering the overall time for such work (e.g., 6 months for a masters thesis), forms a major part compared to the time spent on designing and developing protocols and algorithms (i.e., the focus of re-search). Therefore, to minimize the aforementioned entry effort in using testbeds for experiments, we have setup a testbed called the Versatile Experiment Platform for Sensor Networks (VEPSNet), which has a common Linux based en-vironment with a homogeneous backend to collect data and process results allowing researchers to spend their quality time in the actual research work. In this paper, we provide details of the VEPSNet highlighting how this testbed is used to perform research in the area of WSN.
Subjects
Automation of data collec-Tion
Homogeneous backend
Testbeds
Wireless sensor network