PC104 Based Nodes

PC/104 based testbed is mainly funded by DARPA SenseIT program for SCADDS project. It is built upon off-the-shelf PC/104 based products. Each node has an AMD ElanSC400 CPU, 16MB RAM and 16MB IDE Flash Disk. We use a small adapter to attach a Mote to the PC/104 system. We wrote a kernel mode driver to operate Mote radio via the parallel port. The operation system is Linux and it is binary-compatible to recent RedHat distribution (7.2). 

Currently we have 30 nodes: 14 of them are semi-permanently deployed on 10th and 11th floors, others can be deployed ad hoc on hallways to create interesting experiment scenarios. 

Using the Testbed

Deployed nodes can be accessed from any ISI workstation. The user can start applications either from a startup script or manually using telnet or rsh from a full-size PC. Debugging and logging tools such as syslogd can be started selectively to provide information to study system behaviors in different levels of details.

We also designed a CVS-like management system to support multiple users. Different experiments require different software from lower device driver to higher directed diffusion applications. In order to avoid interference to each other, individual user maintains a separate copy of Linux distribution. When a testbed node boots up, it loads the corresponding Linux distribution from its assigned owner. This way, multiple experiments can be done at the same time, at least in a time-sharing fashion. You may find the following links helpful for getting started with the PC/104 based testbed:

• Guideline for running experiments on our testbed

• Cookbook for your first directed diffusion application

• Tools and scripts to aid experiments 

• Location and network topology of testbed nodes

Related Links

• SCADDS Project

• LECS at UCLA

Please send comments about this web page to [email protected].
Last modified: $Date: 2003-11-18 11:56:46 -0800 (Tue, 18 Nov 2003) $