Visibility Levels: Managing the Tradeoff between Visibility and Resource Consumption

Abstract

Abstract. Pre-deployment tests of sensor networks in indoor testbeds can only deliver a very approximate view of the correctness and performance of a deployed sensor network and it is therefore common that after deployment problems and failures occur that could not be observed during pre-deployment tests. Finding and fixing such problems requires visibility of the system state, such that an engineer can identify causes of misbehavior. Unfortunately, exposing the internal state of sensor nodes requires resources such as communication bandwidth and energy: the better visibility of system state is required, the more resources are needed to extract that state from the sensor network. In this paper we propose a concept and tool that give the user explicit control over this tradeoff. Essentially, the user can specify a resource budget and our tool strives to provide best possible visibility while not exceeding the resource budget. We present the design of our vLevels framework and report the results of a case study demonstrating that the overhead of our approach is small and that visibility is automatically adjusted to meet the specified resource budget.

Work in Progress: Resourse-Aware Fault Localization in Large Sensor Networks

“…The work described in this paper builds on our previous work on Visibility levels [2], a monitoring system that allows to manage the trade-off between the visibility of node state and resource consumption. By annotating the source code, program variables can be logged at execution time.…”

Performance Review of Selected Topology-Aware Routing Strategies for Clustering Sensor Networks

“…In addition to this, it must be mentioned that these nodes can be deployed in remote and inaccessible regions where battery recharge or replacement can be extremely difficult (Beutel et al, 2009;Dargie and Poellabauer, 2010). Therefore, the goal of WSN designers is to maximize the battery's lifespan amidst the afore-mentioned constraints and limiting environmental factors (Schoellhammer, 2010;Ma and Romer, 2014). Studies have empirically demonstrated that data transmission and reception are high energyconsuming network operations (Salami et al, 2011;Karapistoli et al, 2010).…”