“Methods and Tools for Assessment of Wireless Networks in Extreme Environments”

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Rui Pedro Caldeira, Jeferson L. R. Souza, Ricardo Correia Pinto, José Rufino

in IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments 2015 (WiSEE), Miami, Florida, United States of America, Dec. 2015.

Abstract: Wireless sensor and actuator networks are now ubiquitous being used in a continuously growing number of application settings. Many of these applications, such as those commonly found in avionics and aerospace, have the ability to host, in the same computing platform, applications with different levels of criticality (or importance), i.e. mixed-critical, where real-time and dependability requirements are a must. Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are paving their way in these extreme environments and application domains. However, one key point is that WSANs are extremely susceptible to communication errors induced by electromagnetic interferences. Furthermore, there is a general lack of knowledge of such error patterns as well as no open tools enabling its capture. This paper presents a state of the art solution for one-hop assessment of WSANs in the presence of errors. The solution includes devices and comprehensive methods to monitor the real-time behaviour of the network, to emulate accidental errors and to perform intentional attacks. This allows to study the error, timing and performance characteristics of WSANs, thus contributing to an accurate characterization of the behaviour of network-based protocols, in several application domains, including extreme environments, opening room for system verification/validation, as well as qualification and certification. A prototype of the assessment suite based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is presented, along with a set of simple, yet representative, use cases.