Dual-Mote: A Sensor Network testbed for high rate sensing-transmission and runtime evaluation

Most researchers encountered the following two problems when working with real Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): (1) Sensor nodes cannot satisfy application requirements even though the nominal sensing/transmission rates of these nodes are much higher than required. (2) In a WSN deployed in a large area, it is difficult or infeasible to get runtime performance evaluation of sensor nodes. We found out that the root reason of these two problems is resource competition, in which an operation has to wait for the resources being used by other operations. Therefore, we propose a dual-mote testbed, which is able to avoid both hardware competition on a node and wireless channel competition in a network. We have implemented the hardware, supporting protocols and tools of the testbed. The experimental results show that, compared to a general WSN, the improvement on performances such as throughput and response speed by our testbed are more than doubled.