Wireless Sensor Networks Monitoring Tool

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) typically consists of a large number of nodes performing specific tasks such as measuring or monitoring environmental conditions (temperature, luminosity, humidity, etc.). WSNs once deployed are intended to work for a long period of time. Possible scenarios are the ones where human presence is not possible or encouraged such as battlefield, in military application. Due to the large number of nodes in WSNs, the management and the maintenance of the WSN is a challenging task. To ease the management of WSNs, a monitoring tool is of utmost importance to perform some management tasks such as visualize nodes resources usage (node status), send control message to the nodes and also to provide a general knowledge of the network as whole. Beside of monitoring purpose, the monitoring tool can also be used prior to deployment of a new application on the network, for testing purposes, in order to guarantee that all application requirements are satisfied before deploying it. There are some existing monitoring tools that provide data visualization and also perform control of the nodes on the network. However, none of them provides mechanisms to measure performance related metrics such as packet delay or throughput. This dissertation focuses on WSNs monitoring tools which provide the same features of the other existing tools and also provide mechanism to measure performance related metric. A new WSN monitoring tool based on Octopus was developed which is able to measure packets delay and packet lost. The information about these two QoS parameters is available in a live fashion and also information about past metrics history.