Wireless Sensor Network Testbed @ USC/ISI

Overview

Text Box: Our testbed is mainly funded by DARPA SenseIT program for SCADDS project. For more information about SCADDS, you are welcome to visit its official web page.

 

Currently the testbed consists of 30 nodes built from off-shelf PC-104-based products: 14 of them are semi-permanently deployed on 10th and 11th floors, others can be deployed ad hoc on the hallways to create interesting experiment scenarios. Each node is equipped with an AMD ElanSC400 CPU, 16MB RAM, 16MB IDE Flash Disk. It also has a Radio Packet Controller (RPC) at 418Mhz. We have a small adapter designed to attach the RPC module to the PC-104 system. We wrote a kernel mode driver to use the RPC via the parallel port.  The operation system is Linux and it is binary-compatible to recent RedHat distribution (7.2). A detailed description of the testbed is available here.

Using the Text Box: 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. In this ways, multiple experiments can be done in the same time, at least in the time-sharing fashion considering radio interference. You may find the pages be helpful to get start with our 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

 

Last revised by Jerry Zhao: 1/2/2002