TRIDENT: In-field Connectivity Assessment for Wireless Sensor Networks

Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are notoriously difficult to get right, partly due to the fact that their low-power wireless communication is greatly affected by the char-acteristics of the target environment. An early in-field connectivity assessment of the latter provides fundamental input to the WSN development. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art tools require a sec-ondary networking infrastructure (e.g., USB cables) for gathering experimental data—a luxury one can rarely afford in-field. We present TRIDENT, a tool expressly designed to support in-field connectivity assessment by relying only on the WSN nodes, without additional infrastructure. The tool is also designed to be easy to use, enabling domain experts (instead of WSN experts) to directly configure connectivity assessment towards their specific needs, without requiring coding. The tool is provided in two vari-ants, targeting TMote Sky motes running TinyOS, and Waspmotes running the standard ZigBee stack, covering popular platforms in research and industry, respectively.