Richard Figura

IRIS: Efficient Visualization, Data Analysis and Experiment Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

The design of ubiquitous computing environments is challenging, mainly due to the unforeseeable impact of real-world environments on the system performance. A crucial step to validate the behavior of these systems is to perform in-field experiments under various conditions. We introduce IRIS, an experiment management and data processing tool allowing the definition of arbitrary complex data analysis applications. While focusing on Wireless Sensor Networks, IRIS supports the seamless integration of heterogeneous data gathering technologies. The resulting flexibility and extensibility enable the definition of various services, from experiment management and performance evaluation to user-specific applications and visualization. IRIS demonstrated its effectiveness in three real-life use cases, offering a valuable support for in-field experimentation and development of customized applications for interfacing the end user with the system.

Kassandra: A framework for distributed simulation of heterogeneous cooperating objects

Abstract To address the heterogeneity and scalability issues of simulating Cooperating Objects (COs) systems, we propose Kassandra , a conceptual framework for enabling distributed COs simulation by integrating existing simulation tools. Moreover, Kassandra exploits the communication middleware used by real-world COs as underlying communication mechanism for integrating Kassandra -enabled simulation tools. In this way, real-world COs can be included with simulated objects in a seamless way to perform more accurate system performance evaluation. Moreover, such a hardware-in-the-loop approach is not limited to pre-deployment performance analysis, and can offer possibilities to analyse performance at different phases of CO applications. The concept of Kassandra has been carried out in the EU PLANET project. In this paper, we introduce the Kassandra framework components and show their interactions at different phases for node deployments in PLANET use cases. The result demonstrates the applicability of Kassandra to facilitate the development of CO applications.

Boreas: Efficient Synchronization for Scalable Emulation of Sensor Networks

Cycle-accurate emulation of sensor networks allows a detailed analysis of platform target code for development and evaluation. However, the high overhead incurred by providing the necessary fidelity limits the size of the emulated networks considerably. The use of multiple cores provided by modern hardware can significantly improve the speed of emulation but requires synchronization algorithms to preserve causality. Based on the well-known multithreaded event-driven emulator Avrora, we investigate a number of synchronization methods including an algorithm that does not require any locks to improve the performance. We show that both the speed and the scalability can be significantly improved without sacrificing correctness. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of modern CPU technologies such as simultaneous multithreading on emulation performance.

Notos: efficient emulation of wireless sensor networks with binary-to-source translation

Developing for wireless sensor networks is a challenging task due to the severe resource constraints of the devices, the uncertainties of the environment, and the distributed nature of the system. Therefore, simulation is an essential tool for developing systems and for evaluating and comparing protocols at scale in a reproducible manner. Cycle-accurate emulation of sensor networks allows the execution of platform target code and provides deep insight into the behavior of the overall system including the important aspect of energy consumption. However, the required fidelity incurs a significant overhead and limits the size of the emulated networks considerably. We investigate the use of binary-to-source translation, where the machine code of an executable for the target platform is transformed to source code for the host platform and compiled as part of the emulator. Additionally, as part of this transformation we perform static analysis and optimize the generated code. We have implemented our approach based on the well-established emulator Avrora and show in our evaluation that this approach can lead to significantly higher simulation speeds.

IRIS: A Flexible and Extensible Experiment Management and Data Analysis Tool for Wireless Sensor Networks

Performing field experiments is a key step to validate the design of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application and to evaluate its performance under various conditions. We present an experiment management and data analysis tool called IRIS that offers effective management of various configuration settings forWSN experiments. One special feature of IRIS is its extensibility. That is, IRIS allows the developer to define customized functions for application-specific data analysis and performance evaluation. Other main features include: enabling the interaction with the deployedWSN at runtime for fine tuning the experiments and providing graphical presentation for visualizing the collected data as well as the processed results. We highlight the advantages of IRIS for the WSN application development in different experiment phases. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of IRIS with two real-life WSN applications to show that IRIS can be integrated to develop an application and can greatly help in performing experiments more efficiently.