TARWIS — A testbed management architecture for wireless sensor network testbeds

Research in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has become more and more driven by real-world experimental evaluations rather than network simulation. Numerous testbeds of WSNs have been set up in the past decade, often with very much differing architectural design and hardware. The Testbed Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks (TARWIS) presented in this paper provides the most crucial management and scheduling functionalities for WSN testbeds, independent from the testbed architecture and the sensor node´s operating systems. These functionalities are: a consistent notion of users and user groups, resource reservation features, support for reprogramming and reconfiguration of the nodes, provisions to debug and remotely reset sensor nodes in case of node failures, as well as a solution for collecting and storing experimental data. We describe the workflow of using a TARWIS on a WSN testbed over the entire experimentation life cycle, starting from resource reservation over experiment definition to the collection of real-world experimental data.