TWECIS: A testbed for wireless energy constrained industrial sensor actuator networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN) for industrial applications usually have tighter requirements on dependability, synchronization, and real-time capability as compared applications in environmental monitoring or health care. For WSAN research and development, testbeds are a valuable tool as they enable controlled operation under conditions close to reality. In this contribution we present TWECIS, a testbed targeting the investigation of Wireless Energy Constrained Industrial Sensor and Actuator networks. We describe the concept, its architecture and the used hardware. Unique feature of TWECIS is the use of an industrial Real Time Ethernet system which offers the evaluation of the timing behavior of the nodes with a jitter below 100 ns. In addition TWECIS offers synchronized network-wide current measurements on all testbed nodes in a range from 1 μA to 100 mA for accurate power consumption profiling, remote and parallelized programming of nodes, remote in-circuit debugging, monitoring of UART output, and centralized storage of all captured data.