8th Annual Communication Networks and Services Research Conference

A Wireless Sensor Network Testbed

Quang-Dung Ho and Tho Le-Ngoc
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Eng., McGill University
3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2A7, Canada
Emails: {quang.ho, tho.le-ngoc}@mcgill.ca

AbstractKey design requirements for wireless sensor network

(WSN) applications revolve around long battery life, low cost,
small footprint and mesh-networking in supporting communication between large numbers of devices in an interoperable
and multi-application environment. This paper presents a WSN
testbed that aims to facilitate the developments and experiments
of different routing algorithms. Numerous adaptive routing
algorithms are implemented to offer self-healing capability for a
wide range of WSN applications. Senor nodes in the network
can connect together and to sensor gateways in star, mesh,
and hybrid topologies. When any sensor node fails due to
battery drain, physical destruction, hardware and/or software
issues, etc, the network will dynamically route active connections
around isolated network segments in order to minimize service
interruption.

Fig. 1. Various applications of WSN (HVAC: heating, ventilating, and air

conditioning, AMR: automatic meter reading).

I. I NTRODUCTION
Following the recent advances in micro-electromechanical
technology, wireless communications, and digital electronics,
it is technically and economically practical to manufacture a
large number of small and low cost sensors [1][4]. These
tiny sensor nodes consist of sensing, data processing, and
communicating components. It is possible to deploy these
sensor nodes inside or close to the inspected phenomenon,
and to organize them as a wireless sensor network (WSN).
These sensors measure ambient conditions in the environment
surrounding them and then transform these measurements into
signals that can be processed to reveal some characteristics
about phenomena located in the area around these sensors.
WSNs may consist of many different types of sensors,
such as seismic, low sampling rate magnetic, thermal, visual,
infrared, acoustic, and radar, which can monitor temperature,
humidity, vehicular movement, lighting condition, pressure,
soil makeup, noise levels, etc., and therefore they have a wide
range applications. For example, WSN is the key technology
for home automation, commercial building automation, ehealth, smart energy management (or smart grid), etc. Fig.
1 shows a number of target markets typically discussed for
WSNs. Deployment of a sensor network in these applications
can be in random fashion (e.g., dropped from an airplane
in a disaster management application) or manual (e.g., re
alarm sensors in a facility or sensors planted underground for
precision agriculture). Creating a network of these sensors can
assist rescue operations by locating survivors, identifying risky
areas, and making the rescue team more aware of the overall
situation in a disaster area.
Typically, WSNs contain a large number of sensor nodes
that have the ability to communicate either among each
978-0-7695-4041-2/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CNSR.2010.71

Fig. 2.

Structure of a sensor node and a typical WSN.

other or directly to a gateway. Fig. 2 shows a schematic

diagram of sensor node components. Basically, each sensor
node comprises sensing, processing, transmission, and power
units. The same gure shows the communication architecture
of a WSN. Sensor nodes are usually scattered in a sensor eld,
which is an area where the sensor nodes are deployed. Sensor
nodes coordinate among themselves to produce high-quality
information about the physical environment. Each sensor node
bases its decisions on its mission, the information it currently
has, and its knowledge of its computing, communication, and
energy resources. Each of these scattered sensor nodes has the
capability to collect and route data either to other sensors or
back to the gateway. A gateway may be a xed or mobile
node capable of connecting the sensor network to an existing
communications infrastructure or to the core network where a
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user can have access to the reported data.

Design of routing protocols for WSNs is affected by several
factors in different dimensions and thus very challenging.
Followings are some of the characteristic requirements of
routing protocols for WSNs. First, routing protocols should
be energy-efcient due to the fact that sensors typically work
on a very small battery having very low energy. It is nearly
impossible to change the battery of a sensor once it is deployed
while WSNs are required to work for long time. Second, they
should be self-congurable and self-healing because WSNs are
unattended. The system should be robust against node failure
(running out of energy, physical destruction, hardware and/or
software issues, etc). Finally, the routing protocols need to
be scalable. How to manage communication among a large
number of nodes and propagate an image of what is happening
in the sensing eld to the BS is one of the basic requirements.
This paper presents an experimental WSN testbed which has
been used for various research and development activities. The
testbed facilitates real-life experiments to evaluate advantages
and disadvantages of different WSN routing protocols and to
develop new protocols. The testbed is also used to build up
prototypes for developing numerous WSN key applications,
e.g., home surveillance, smart energy management, e-health,
etc. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents constituting components of each network device in the
testbed as well as various network topologies that can be constructed from those network devices. Section III summarizes
a number of implemented routing protocols. Finally, Section
IV addresses a number of WSN applications constructed from
the testbed.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 4.

II. WSN T ESTBED

A. Network Components

CC2530 evaluation module.

CC2530 evaluation board.

SmartRF05EB: this is the main board in the kit with a

wide range of user interfaces (316 character serial LCD,
full speed USB 2.0 interface, UART, LEDs, serial ash,
potentiometer, joystick, buttons). The EB is the platform
for the evaluation modules (EM) and can be connected
to the PC via USB to control the EM (see Fig. 4).

A network device is programmed to work as either a

gateway, or a router, or an end-device, or a hybrid device:

CC2530 development kit from Texas Instrument (TI) is

employed for our testbed. The CC2530 is TIs second generation ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 compliant System-on-Chip with
an optimized 8051 MCU core and radio for the 2.4 GHz
unlicensed ISM/SRD band. This device enables industrial
grade applications by offering state-of-the-art noise immunity,
excellent link budget, operation up to 125 degrees and low
voltage operation. In addition, the CC2530 provides extensive hardware support for packet handling, data buffering,
burst transmissions, data encryption, data authentication, clear
channel assessment, link quality indication and packet timing
information [5].
Each node in the testbed comprises of an evaluation
module (CC2530EM) placed on top of an evaluation board
(SmartRF05EB):
CC2530EM: this is a complete RF module based on one
of the recommended reference designs for the CC2530
radio. The module is equipped with a 32 MHz crystal, a
32.768 kHz crystal, external passive components for the
balun and antenna match lter, an SMA connector for
the antenna or any other RF instrument connection and
general IO headers/connectors (see Fig. 3).

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Gateway: this device sets up the network and acts as

a portal to monitor network performance and congure
parameters. It also bridges the WSN to the Ethernet via
a serial or USB interface from it to a PC connected to
the Ethernet.
Router: this device extends network area coverage, dynamically routes around obstacles, and provides backup
routes in case of network congestion or device failure.
It can connect to the gateway and other routers, and can
also have child devices.
End-device: this device can start or receive a message,
but cannot forward messages upstream or downstream. It
is connected to either a gateway or a router, and does not
support child devices. It is equipped with a number of
sensors to capture what is going on in surrounding environment, e.g., ambient temperature sensor, light sensor,
human body sensor, digital smart meter, etc.
Hybrid device: this device is implemented with more than
one functionalities and allow it to work as a gateway, a
router, and an end-device at the same time.

latency and lower end-to-end performance. Besides, meshrouting requires more complex network protocols. This means
the routers require more embedded resources, which can result
in increased power consumption and costs.

Fig. 5.

III. ROUTING P ROTOCOL I MPLEMENTATIONS

Despite the innumerable applications of WSNs, these networks have several restrictions, such as limited energy supply,
limited computing power, and limited bandwidth of the wireless links connecting sensor nodes. One of the main design
goals of WSNs is to carry out data communication while trying
to prolong the lifetime of the network and prevent connectivity degradation by employing aggressive energy management
techniques. The design of routing protocols in WSNs is
inuenced by many challenging factors. These factors must
be overcome before efcient communication can be achieved
in WSNs [6]. An extensive survey on different WSN routing
protocols can be found in [6]. In this work we attempt to
evaluate advantages and disadvantages of some typical protocols by real-life experiments. Followings are the summary of
some of routing algorithms that have been implemented in our
testbed:

(a) Star topology, (b) Mesh topology.

B. Network Topologies
Topology refers to the conguration of the hardware components and how the data is transmitted through that conguration. Our testbed has been designed to support different
network topologies: star, mesh, and star-mesh hybrid.
1) Star Topology: In a star topology, all devices are within
direct communication range to the gateway, through which all
messages are routed, as can be seen in Fig. 5.a. A device
sends a message to the gateway, which then passes it on to
the destination device. Direct communication between the end
devices is not supported.
Advantage: its simplicity means that this topology does not
require a complex network layer or routing protocols. Also,
performance is generally high, with packets taking a maximum
of two hops to reach their destination.
Disadvantage: rst, there are no alternative paths between
the device and coordinator, so if a path becomes obstructed,
communication is lost between the device and coordinator.
Second, the radius of the network is limited by the radio range
between the coordinator and child devices (typically from 30
to 100 meters). Finally, networks must be carefully planned
to ensure good connections with no obstacles or interference
between the coordinator and child devices.
2) Mesh Topology: Mesh topology consists of a mesh
of interconnected routers and end devices. Each router is
typically connected through at least two pathways, and can
relay messages for its neighbors, as can be seen in Fig. 5.b.
Mesh topology supports multi-hop communications, through
which data is passed by hopping from device to device using
the most reliable communication links and most cost-effective
path until its destination is reached. The multi-hop ability also
helps to provide fault tolerance, in that if one device fails or
experiences interference, the network can reroute itself using
the remaining devices.
Advantage: rst, this topology is highly reliable and robust.
Should any individual router become inaccessible, alternative
routes can be discovered and used. Next, the use of intermediary devices in relaying data means that the range of the
network can be signicantly increased, making this topology
highly scalable. Last, weak signals and dead zones can be
eliminated by simply adding more routers to the network.
Disadvantage: this topology has a higher communications
overhead than the star topology, which can result in increased

A. Flooding Routing
Several sensor network applications rely heavily on a
network-wide broadcast service for disseminating information.
For example, sink nodes may often need to broadcast codeupdates, TAG-type queries, alarms, etc., to sensor nodes.
Flooding is considered as the simplest means of broadcasting.
A node initiates the transmission by broadcasting its message
to all of its neighbors and other nodes do the same thing upon
receiving the message until the message is delivered to its nal
destination.
This kind of routing is very simple and does not need to
maintain any routing information. However, the drawbacks
of ooding include implosion and resource blindness [6],
[7]. Implosion is caused by duplicate messages sent to the
same node, overlap when two nodes sensing the same region
send similar packets to the same neighbor. Flooding does not
consider network resources and thus results in large energy
consumption. Meanwhile, the main goal of a sensor broadcast
service is to deliver a single copy of the broadcast packet to
each sensor, while minimizing the number of transmissions.
Flooding is implemented in our testbed because it is employed for neighbor detection and/or route discovery in other
advanced routing protocols.
B. Gossip Routing
Gossiping avoids the problem of implosion introduced by
ooding by just selecting a random node to which to send
the message rather than broadcasting the message blindly [8],
[9]. In gossip-based protocols, each node contacts one or a
few nodes in each round (usually chosen at random), and
exchanges information with these nodes. The dynamics of
information spread bear a resemblance to the spread of an epidemic [10], [11], and lead to high fault-tolerance and selfstabilization [11][13]. Gossip-based protocols usually do not

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Fig. 6.

Home surveillance application.

require error recovery mechanisms, and thus enjoy a large

advantage in simplicity, while often incurring only moderate
overhead compared to optimal deterministic protocols, such as
the construction of data dissemination trees. The guarantees
obtained from gossip are usually probabilistic in nature; they
achieve high stability under stress and disruptions, and scale
gracefully to a huge number of nodes. In comparison, traditional techniques have absolute guarantees, but are unstable or
fail to make progress during periods of even modest disruption.
Gossiping is a simple solution, yet capable of achieving
better reliability and load-balance than deterministic solutions.
However, this causes delays in propagation of data through the
nodes.

Fig. 7.

Smart energy management application.

that detects this break may locally repair the route if the
destination is close in number of hops to the node. If local
repair cannot be completed successfully or the option is not
supported, the node that detects the link break creates a Route
Error (RERR) message which reports the set of destinations
that are now unreachable and sends it to precursor nodes.
Then, the source of the active path starts a new route discovery
phase if a route to the destination is still needed. Data packets
waiting for a route should be buffered during route discovery.
An AODV node that belongs to an active route may
periodically broadcast local Hello messages for connectivity
management. After reception of a Hello message from a
neighbor, if no packet is received from that neighbor for more
than a given time, the node should assume that the link is
currently broken. Other link failure detection strategies include
link and network layer mechanisms. For example, unsuccessful
layer two transmissions may be used as an indication of a
link break for AODV. This method is known as Link Layer
Notication (LLN). The AODV specication does not mandate
whether the unsuccessfully transmitted packet triggering a link
failure detection should be buffered or not in this case.
In order to implement the AODV protocol in a very small
footprint, TinyAODV makes various simplications as listed
below:
RREP messages are only generated by the destination.
Routes never expire.
Only the hop count metric is used.
No messages are generated to keep routes active because
routes never expire. Route errors are generated when a
data message can no longer be sent over the path. This
is detected using link level acknowledgements.
There exists a major difference between the two latest

C. Tiny Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (TinyAODV)

Routing
TinyAODV [14] is a lightweight version of AODV [15], a
widely-referenced reactive routing protocol in wireless ad-hoc
networks. For AODV protocol, when a node requires a route,
it initiates a route discovery procedure broadcasting Route
Request (RREQ) messages. When a node receives a RREQ,
if either it has a valid route entry to the demanded destination
or it is the destination itself, it creates and sends a Route
Reply (RREP) message back to the originator node. Every
node maintains route entries with forward and backward next
hop information that expire after a specied time if the path
becomes inactive (i.e., it is not used for data transmission).
For each route entry of a node, there exists a precursor list
containing the nodes that use this one as the next hop in the
path to a given destination. The metric used in AODV is the
hop count. Loop-freedom of routes towards a destination is
guaranteed by means of a destination sequence number, which
is updated whenever new information about that destination is
received.
When a link breaks along an active path, the upstream node
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versions of the implementation. In TinyAODV Release 2, only

one node, namely a sink node, could be the destination of any
data transmission. TinyAODV Release 3 enables communcation between any pair of nodes in the network. The following
description corresponds to TinyAODV Release 3.
If a data packet need to be sent and no route entry exists for
the intended destination, route discovery is performed, but the
packet requiring the route is discarded. The next packet will
be the rst one using the discovered route. A number of route
discovery retries (equal to 3 by default) can be performed.
Only the destination generates RREP messages. A LLN
mechanism is supported for detecting link failures, assuming
the usage of an acknowledged mode at layer two. However,
LLN is not enabled by default. Thus, TinyAODV is targetted
for static topology networks, where link failures are not
expected. In any case, the packet undelivered due to a link
break is discarded. Then, a RERR is generated and locally
broadcast by the upstream node detecting the link failure. In
any case, local repair is not supported. Finally, hop count is
the routing metric used in the TinyAODV implementation.
TinyAODV is reasonably efcient in networks that are
largely static in connectivity and primarily have localized
trafc. Each device participating in a route must store a table
entry for that route, consuming memory. For localized trafc,
the memory overhead is constrained to devices on the route
[16].

Fig. 8.

E-health application.

in a house or building are connected together and remotely

monitored/controlled by incorporating sensors in each of them.
The power consumption is measured by a digital smart meter
connected to the sensor gateway via a RS232 or USB interface.
The smart meter records total electricity consumption hourby-hour and the gateway sends that information to utility
companies through a wireless technology.
With the ability to measure when electricity is used, utility
companies can apply different prices at different times of
the day, so-called time-of-use (TOU) pricing. As a result,
customers have a better way to manage their electricity use
and their bills. Customers may prefer to shift the use of major
electricity appliances, e.g., air conditioners, clothes dryers and
washers, electric heaters, etc., to off-peak hours. The electricity
bill can show how much electricity is consumed within each
TOU period, and detailed information may be available to
customers via the Internet or by mobile phone.

IV. S OME TARGETED WSN A PPLICATIONS

A. Home Surveillance
Our testbed is employed to implement a home surveillance
system that consists of a variety of sensors that can monitor
a house. As shown in Fig. 6, a gateway device can send
messages from sensors to any PC connected to the Internet
or mobile phone in order to provide home owners with
more awareness of the state of their homes. The system can
monitor events such as re via smoke and temperature sensors,
intrusion via door open/close sensors, human body and motion
detection sensors, etc. At any time, the state of each sensor
can be checked via a PC or mobile phone interface. The
network is robust to node failure because mesh topology
is employed. For example, even when some sensors and/or
routers are destroyed by intruders, the alarm messages can
be routed through the network and successfully delivered to
home owner monitoring devices and/or police stations over
dynamically-selected alternate paths.

C. E-health
E-health refers to healthcare practice which is supported
by electronic processes and communication. Our testbed is
used to prototype an e-health application that can be deployed
in an emergency room or intensive care unit in a hospital.
As can be seen in Fig. 8, the patients vital signs (e.g., heart
rate, temperature) and disease-specic indicators (e.g., blood
pressure, EKG, EEG) are monitored on a continuous basis
by a number of sensors attached on the patients body. The
data collected by the medical sensors is time-stamped and
securely forwarded to a sensor gateway. The gateway then
securely forwards the aggregated information to a central
monitoring/managing system over a WiFi mesh network and
wired backbone network.
At pre-determined settings, alarms are issued and responses/actions could be triggered automatically. For example,
if during the monitoring of a diabetic patient the blood glucose
level falls below a certain threshold, an alert can be sent to
the patients, physicians and/or medical personnel. Fig. 8 also
highlights that the WSN cooperates with an indoor localization

B. Smart Energy Management

Another application that can be built up with our testbed is
a smart energy management system. Recently, the relatively
high cost of energy and a growing movement toward energy
efciency has made energy management one of the key
drivers in the adoption of WSNs in residential and commercial
buildings. This application can cover all aspects of home and
building system control including heating and air conditioning
(HVAC), lighting control, smart appliance control, and smart
metering, as can be seen in Fig. 7. All electricity appliances

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system to offer location-based services. For example, when a

patient needs an urgent medical attention due to his/her heart
problem, an available heart specialist who is working closest
to the location of that patient is alarmed and requested to take
care of him/her right away.
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