WSNTB: A testbed for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we design and implement a testbed to realize various experiments in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Our implementation includes hardware infrastructure and software framework. The hardware infrastructure consists of servers, gateways with converters, and sensor nodes in three-tier. Our testbed can support different sensor nodes with USB or RS232 interface. Users can experiment with real hardware resources and interactive with our testbed in real-time. Here, we deploy two kinds of self-designed sensor nodes, Octopus I and Octopus II, in our testbed. The Octopus sensor nodes are compatible with IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard for experiments. The software framework composes with three main layers: services interface layer, testbed core layer, and resource access layer. Our testbed allows users to customize their applications for specific sensor nodes and experiments locally with remote hardware resource. Users can freely choose the number of nodes and assign a period of processing time through our testbed Website. By using our testbed, users can save lots time from creating an experiment environment, reduce the hardware expense, enhance the devices utilization rate, and fasten on the verification of experiment results.