An experimental framework for data gathering and analysis in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the last decade testbeds have been set-up to evaluate network protocols and algorithms under realistic settings. Moreover, wireless sensors have lately been integrated into testbeds in order to simulate application scenarios for lowpower sensor networks, such as environment monitoring. Due to the fact that such scenarios are usually designed to run for a relatively long duration, long-term experiments are rarely executed, in order to avoid blocking of testbed facilities. Toward, this direction, we propose the NITOS Sensors Toolkit framework that provides for measurements storage in the testbed's database so that users do not have to run online experiments to generate data, but they can access real sensor records in an offine way. Moreover, online measurement gathering is automated and further simplified using the OMF management framework [1], so that it becomes a transparent process for the experimenter. The proposed framework is also accompanied by a web user interface that allows the user to get a graphical representation of the stored measurements and also extract various statistical measures. NITOS Sensors Toolkit allows for a more sophisticated way to setup and analyze experiments based on Wireless Sensor Networks. © 2011 Authors.