HATBED: Hardware Assisted Tracing Testbed for Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

Embedded networked sensor systems are deeply coupled with the physical world, and the deployed systems are usually difficult to debug. Therefore, it is especially important to thoroughly test and profile the systems before deploying to the real world. Traditional debugging methods are incompetent for detailed tracing on resource constrained devices due to their intrusiveness. This paper proposes a low-cost Hardware Assisted Tracing testBED (HATBED) to enable non-intrusive tracing and profiling for embedded networked sensor systems independent of operating systems and applications. We hope HATBED will foster research on comprehensive testing and profiling of embedded networked systems based on modern 32-bit architecture.