DiF: A Diagnosis Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Advances of wireless sensor networks have seen proliferation of network protocols and architectures, especially those proprietary WSNs for dedicated application areas. It has become critical for the success of these WSN, to quickly and reliably identify the deviation of implementation from the specification, or commissioning from planning. Given the nature of WSNs being wireless, multi-hop and embedded, diagnosis of WSNs is very challenging comparing to that in conventional wired or wireless networks. This paper proposed DiF, a framework for the above mentioned diagnosis tasks. Besides the flexibility for diagnosis of different WSNs, DiF also has the capability of detailed analysis for potential problems of a specific WSN implementation or deployment. The framework has proven to be very effective and efficient in a trial on WirelessHART, as well as on our internal WSN development and test.