COOJA/MSPSim: interoperability testing for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are moving towards emerging standards such as IP, ZigBee and WirelessHART which makes interoperability testing important. Interoperability testing is performed today through black-box testing with vendors physically meeting to test their equipment. Black-box testing can test interoperability but gives no detailed information of the internals in the nodes during the testing. Blackbox testing is required because existing simulators cannot simultaneously simulate sensor nodes with different firmware. For standards such as IP and WirelessHART, a white-box interoperability testing approach is desired, since it gives details on both performance and clues about why tests succeeded or failed. To allow white-box testing, we propose a simulation-based approach to interoperability testing, where the firmware from different vendors is run in the same simulator.

We extend our MSPSim emulator and COOJA wireless sensor network simulator to support interoperable simulation of sensor nodes with firmware from different vendors. To demonstrate both cross-vendor interoperability and the benefits of white-box interoperability testing, we run the state-of-the-art Contiki and TinyOS operating systems in a single simulation. Because of the white-box testing, we can do performance measurement and power profiling over both operating systems.