Research And Design Of A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Analyzing And Commissioning System

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of inexpensive and low-power sensor nodes which are spatially distributed to cooperatively monitor physical and environmental conditions. WSN has been identified as a key technological area and new frontier which holds the potential to dramatically change the way we live. Several technical challenges in WSN's research and development need to be addressed due to the specialized nature of the sensor network. Firstly, WSN is a resource-constrained distributed system, which has litimited power sources, limited communication ability and poor computer ability. Secondly, due to the lack of user interface, intuitive debugger and analysis tools, the network visualization is much more restricted. It's also very hard to commission and manage it and to position the problems quikly. Lastly, from microcosmic aspect, it's much harder to get the sensor nodes' states in WSN than in ordinary network; from macroscopical aspect, it's harder to anylyze and measure the efficiency and performance in WSN than in ordinary network. Above all, an anylizing and commissioning tool become a key point in the research and development of WSN applications.Based on the research of IEEE802.15.4 standards, ZigBee and other WSN protocols, this paper describes common WSN network architecture and implements a universal WSN monitoring system which can analyze and commission a large WSN. The system contains two parts. One part is the visualization software on server. The software can analyze multiple network layer protocols, such as Zigbee, EmBee and ST601 protocols. It can also visualize the network topologies, link quality and device states. Users can configure a new protocol with the opening interface and send control packets to wireless sensor nodes to commission them. The other part is the WSN sniffer node. Several sniffer nodes are connected by Ethernet and are synchronized with the IEEE1588 standard. The sniffers cooperate with each other to collect wireless packets which are emitted by individual wireless sensor nodes, and then transmit the packets via TCP/IP to the visualization software.The test results show that the system is universal, steady and efficient. It can satisfy the practical application requirements.