SDB : A Novel Simulation-Based Debugger for Sensor Network Applications

Sensor network computing can be characterized as resourceconstrained distributed computing using unreliable, low bandwidth communication. This combination of characteristics poses significant software development and maintenance challenges. Effective and efficient debugging tools for sensor network are thus critical. Extant development tools, such as TOSSIM, EmStar, ATEMU and Avrora, provide useful debugging support, but not with the fidelity, scale and functionality that we believe are sufficient to meet the needs of the next generation of applications. In this paper, we propose a debugger, called SDB, based on a distributed full system sensor network simulator with high fidelity and scalable performance, DiSenS. By exploiting the potential of DiSenS as a scalable full system simulator, SDB extends conventional debugging methods by adding novel device level, program source level, group level, and network level debugging abstractions. The performance evaluation shows that all these debugging features introduce overhead that is generally less than 10% into the simulator and thus making SDB an efficient and effective debugging tool for sensor networks.