A LabVIEW based test-bed with off-the-shelf components for research in mobile sensor networks

This paper describes the development of a mobile sensor network test-bed at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute (University of Texas at Arlington). LabVIEW high-level programming language is used to program, control and monitor a variety of off-the-shelf hardware platforms (both sensor motes and mobile robots). The test-bed is composed of two independent mobile sensor networks connected to the same base station. The first network has controlled mobility and performs environmental monitoring tasks. The second network has random mobility and acts as an unpredictable source of events for the first network. After providing a detailed description of the hardware and software design of our test-bed, we describe two case studies in mobile sensor network research which we are currently implementing on our test-bed, namely potential field localization and discrete event coordination.