Indriya: A low-cost, 3D wireless sensor network testbed

Abstract

This paper presents Indriya, a large-scale, low-cost wireless sensor network testbed deployed at the National University of Singapore. Indriya uses TelosB devices and it is built on an active-USB infrastructure. The infrastructure acts as a remote programming back-channel and it also supplies electric power to sensor devices. Indriya is designed to reduce the costs of both deployment and maintenance of a large-scale testbed. Indriya has been in use by over 100 users with its maintenance incurring less than US$500 for almost 2 years of its usage. In the second part of this paper, we provide an extensive study of all 16 channels of IEEE 802.15.4 supported by CC2420 devices constituting Indriya. The objective is to understand performance differences and correlations that may exist among different channels. The measurement results are of interest to the WSN community as they may be useful in designing WSN routing and MAC protocols that exploit channel-diversity. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.