NSSN: A network monitoring and packet sniffing tool for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks usually are deployed in the complex environments and take a long time to run without human intervention. In addition, the sensor nodes have limited resources and use unstable wireless link for communication, which cause wireless sensor networks various problems in the actual operation. Therefore, the real-time monitoring tools are needed to maintain the operation of wireless sensor networks, which are capable of monitoring network operating conditions, assessing network performance, detecting network failure and optimizing network operation. A network monitoring and packet sniffing tool for wireless sensor networks (NSSN) is presented and implemented in this paper. As a kind of real-time monitoring tools based sniffers, NSSN can capture the radio packets from the normal nodes using NSSNer nodes, so that it can monitor network status, find network problems and optimize network configuration without any interference in the normal operation of wireless sensor networks. The functions which NSSN has implemented include network monitoring, protocol parsing and display, network diagnosis and performance measurement, data mining and statistical analysis. According to the actual deployment, NSSN has been verified good monitoring performance.