Experimental evaluation of distributed sniffer solution for wireless sensor networks

To obtain insight into the network traffic of wireless sensor networks that cover large areas and operate on multiple channels, more than one sniffer needs to be deployed. In an earlier work, we proposed a distributed sniffer solution, d-Argus, which enables remote access to captured traffic. d-Argus is designed to solve the problem of duplicate packets, captured by more than one sniffer, thus providing a trace of unique network traffic. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate d-Argus by conducting experiments on OpenTestbed, a testbed at Inria Paris, with a varying number of active sensor nodes and using two sniffers. We show that the selection of the appropriate client-side buffer size largely affects the ability of d-Argus to effectively filter duplicated packets.