SPI-SNOOPER: a hardware-software approach for transparent network monitoring in wireless sensor networks
Venue
Proceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012), pp. 53-62
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Mohammad Sajjad Hossain, Woo Suk Lee, Vijay Raghunathan
BibTeX
Abstract
The lack of post-deployment visibility into system operation is one of the major
challenges in ensuring reliable operation of remotely deployed embedded systems
such as wireless sensor nodes. Over the years, many software-based solutions (in
the form of debugging tools and protocols) have been proposed for in-situ system
monitoring. However, all of them share the trait that the monitoring functionality
is implemented as software executing on the same embedded processor that the main
application executes on. This is a poor design choice from a reliability
perspective. This paper makes the case for a joint hardware-software solution to
this problem and advocates the use of a dedicated reliability co-processor that is
tasked with monitoring the operation of the embedded system. As an embodiment of
this design principle, this paper presents Spi-Snooper, a co-processor augmented
hardware platform specifically designed for network monitoring. Spi-Snooper is
completely cross-compatible with the Telos wireless sensor nodes from an
operational standpoint and is based on a novel hardware architecture that enables
transparent snooping of the communication bus between the main processor and the
radio of the wireless embedded system. The accompanying software architecture
provides a powerful tool for monitoring, logging, and even controlling all the
communication that takes place between the main processor and the radio. We present
a rigorous evaluation of our prototype and demonstrate its utility using a variety
of usage scenarios.
