Center for Embedded Network Sensing

Understanding how a sensor network system works requires running the system, extracting log files, and manually interpreting system metrics. When interpreting system metrics, we often try to correlate behavior over multiple modalities. For example, if a node is exhibiting strange behaviors, the cause may be due to weak battery, geographically bad placement, collision, interference, sensor failure, algorithmic faults, or a combination of the above. This approach of interpreting metrics is adequate for closed systems such as the ones run in simulations, with limited duration. However, for complex sensor network systems that have already been deployed for weeks or even months in the fields, this approach is difficult, laborious, and error-prone. Thus, a suite of tools to help analyze complex sensor network system is desirable. We have implemented Deployment Analysis System (DAS), a centralized data mining suite designed to better understand sensor networks. It supports visualization and deployment-related queries that allow the user to inspect historical system metrics, environmental data, geographical placements, and system status.