Sensei-UU — A Relocatable WSN Testbed Supporting Repeatable Node Mobility

Abstract

General purpose testbeds for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems are often deployed in lab environments. This means that the testbed environment may differ considerably from the target environment of a system with respect to e.g. radio interference and sensory input. Furthermore, many WSN scenarios include mobile nodes, such as mobile sensors and mobile sinks, whose movements can affect the experimental results considerably. Both these features pose a challenge to achieving consistent and reliable experimental results during the evaluation and testing of a WSN system.

To attack this challenge, we are developing the Sensei-UU WSN testbed. It follows a light-weight, distributed design, so that instances of the testbed can be easily relocated; this enables experimenters to evaluate a system in different environments. To support scenarios including mobile nodes, Sensei-UU uses robots which carry out mobility patterns defined by the experimenter.

Our evaluation shows that our design supports repeatable experiments in various environments, even when the experiments involve mobile nodes.