PARED: A testbed with parallel reprogramming and multi-channel debugging for WSNs

Testbed plays an invaluable role in facilitating research and development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN testbed involves three fundamental tasks, which are reprogramming the WSN nodes, debugging the WSN applications and observing the status of the WSN nodes. In this paper, we propose a testbed with parallel reprogramming and multi-channel debugging capabilities (PARED) to meet the challenge behind those tasks. A parallel reprogramming mechanism is properly designed, which can reprogram all the nodes simultaneously and significantly diminishes the time wasted in WSN application deployment. PARED provides multichannel debugging support allowing users to set the debugging channel. PARED is also capable of observing the energy consumption of the sensor node along with its status information. We have deployed PARED in our laboratory at the scale of 50 nodes and a series of experiments have been conducted which proved that it is a reliable and convenient infrastructure for WSN research.