Passive inspection of sensor networks

Deployment of sensor networks in real-world settings is a labor-intensive and cumbersome task: environmental influences often trigger problems that are difficult to track down due to limited visibility of the network state. In this paper we present a framework for passive inspection (i.e., no instrumentation of sensor nodes required) of deployed sensor networks and show how this framework can be used to inspect data gathering applications. The basic approach is to temporarily install a distributed network sniffer alongside the inspected sensor network, with overheard messages being analyzed by a data stream processor and network state being displayed in a graphical user interface. Our tool can be flexibly applied to different sensor network operating systems and protocol stacks, and can deal well with incomplete information. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.