A testbed technique supporting performance measurement for wireless sensor networks

To solve the problems in real-time evaluation and deep analysis of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, a novel Mote and TinyOS based WSN testbed architecture characterized by supporting distributed in-situ performance measurement of experimental objects was proposed. The system under test and the measurement metrics were defined and a set of high energy-efficient measurement algorithms were implemented. The lightweight measurement entity built in the testbed during experiments enables the reliably acquirement of node energy consumption, link quality, throughput, packet loss rate, delay and network topology without bringing extra load traffic upon radio. The testbed technology provides flat, cluster, segmented, mesh, multi-sink network structure adaption, so enhances the testbed infrastructure utilization and improves the experiments deployment efficiency. The research cases proved its significant features of conveniency, fidelity, universality and scalability.