HMP: A Hybrid Monitoring Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks Evaluation

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as an essential part of the deployment of the Internet of Things paradigm, require an adequate debugging and monitoring procedures to avoid errors in their operation. One of the best tools for WSN supervision is the so-called Monitoring Platforms that harvest information about the WSN operation in order to detect errors and evaluate performance. Monitoring platforms for the WSN can be hardware or software implemented, and, additionally, they can work in active or passive mode. Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. To benefit from their advantages and compensate their limitations, hybrid platforms combine different approaches. However, very few hybrid tools, with many restrictions, have been proposed. Most of them are designed for a specific implementation of WSN nodes; many of them are lack of a real implementation, and none of them provides an accurate solution to synchronization issues. This paper presents a hybrid monitoring platform for WSN, called HMP. This platform combines both hardware and software, active and passive monitoring approaches. This hybridization provides many interesting capabilities; HMP harvests the information both actively (directly from the sensor nodes) and passively (by means of messages captured from the WSN), causing a very low intrusion in the observed network. In addition, HMP is reusable; it may be applied to almost any WSN and includes a suitable trace synchronism procedure. Finally, HMP follows an open architecture that allows interoperability and layered development.