Wireless sensor networks have emerged as an exciting new area of research in computer science. Continuously shrinking battery powered nodes are equipped with processing, sensing and RF capabilities. However, deploying a network into a realistic environment requires iteratively reprogramming dozens of nodes, locating them throughout an area large enough to produce an interesting radio topology, and instrumenting them to extract debugging and performance data.   A number of testbed approaches have been proposed by universities and industry to ease the burden imposed by this deployment exercise. These testbeds vary in the number and type of motes employed and the manner they are connected to the central computer system. For example a separate wired back-channel is usually used for reprogramming, network management and data logging issues. However, this introduces increased cost due to additional hardware equipment required and exhibits low scalability. In this work, we present an efficient and low cost sensor network testbed that exploits only the wireless channel to transfer data and orders an additional number of benefits to users and administrators like ease of deployment, ease of use, no need of a wired infrastructure, coping with multiple users at the same time and most importantly scalability.
['Tassos Dimitriou', 'John Kolokouris', 'Nikos Zarokostas']
Sensenet: a wireless sensor network testbed