A Mobile Inspecting Tool for Wireless Sensor Networks

The number of wireless sensor networks is constantly increasing. In the deployment phase of the WSNs projects it is common for failures to appear. These can be caused by software or hardware faults or by environmental factors. In order to find the source of these problems, the WSN needs to be inspected. Since the deployments of WSN are often made in inaccessible or hazardous area, the inspection operation can have a high degree of risk. In order to facilitate these intervention, the design and implementation of a WSN mobile monitoring tool is proposed.The tool is composed of an application built for a Neo FreeRunner smartphone which interfaces a TelosB mote via USB. The TelosB mote acts a sniffer and sends the data to the smartphone which analyzes it and displays packet information. The system is also able to use passive or active monitoring and track other nodes using a method of estimating distances to nodes using the RSSI value. The tool can be also used as a debugger for WSNs by replaying the last session and setting breakpoints. To evaluate this prototype, the localizing method is tested, together with the capacity of the sniffer mote process packets and the collision detection accuracy.