Verification and Validation of Smartphone Sensor Networks

This paper introduces a subset of mobile wireless sensor networks, called smartphone sensor networks, where large numbers of smartphone devices cooperate to perform sensing tasks. While these emerging networks show high potential, little work has been done on design-time verification and validation to ensure that a designed system will meet the specified goals. This paper introduces Empower, a simulation environment for smartphone sensor networks that simulates smartphone-specific properties of a sensor network, such as data collection policies, and outputs high-level system metrics, such as coverage of the environment being monitored. Experimentation is used to demonstrate that Empower’s ability to derive system design parameters, such as the minimum number of smartphones required for proper operation, or the most appropriate data collection policy for the production environment.