Increasing the Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks with a Unit Testing Framework

Designing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has proven to be a slow, tedious and error-prone process due to the inherent intricacies of designing a distributed, wireless, and embedded system. Previous projects have shown that it is vital to follow a systematic design approach accompanied by an end-toend test methodology to satisfy all design requirements including robustness and reliability in a newly developed application. In this paper, we propose the fundamentals of such a test methodology. We present essential features of a framework suitable for testing a broad range of WSN applications. We demonstrate with a case study that our test methodology is a feasible approach by integrating a number of available design-tools for the TinyOS operating system. While we target TinyOS in the case study due to its widespread use in WSN applications, the proposed test methodology is general and not tailored to a single WSN platform or operating system.