Hi Kavitha,
I think the correct, but useless answer to your question is "it depends" ;-) Disclaimer: my company sells nodes and testbeds (product page <http://www.sownet.nl/index.php/en/products/testbed> ) so the following will involve some product placement... but hopefully, also some practical advice :-) Just 20 or 30 nodes will let you run interesting experiments, and provides room for multiple users at the same time. Starting small and adding additional nodes shouldn't be hard once the basic infrastructure is in place. An important factor to keep in mind when deciding on a testbed is how it will be installed. For a "wireless" testbed, running cables can be a major part of the total cost! For comparison, take two of our testbeds installed at different clients (TU Delft and TNO). TU Delft uses 27 separate sets of 4 nodes with a mini-PC <http://www.sownet.nl/images/stories/alixmet4xgnodegstubweb393.jpg> , installed in different rooms across one floor of a building, which involved having extra Ethernet and power sockets installed all over the place. The other testbed is a rack mounted setup, consisting of 4 19" cases <https://www.sownet.nl/images/stories/r301blink.jpg> , which each have 20 nodes plugged into their front panel. This gives you a very compact testbed, which is very easy to install (each 19" case just needs a power and ethernet cable). By turning down the transmit power you can still get a multihop network, but it's not as "interesting" as a physically distributed setup . Of course, you could also mix and match the two. The other important choice is what nodes to use. Telos and Mica family nodes are the most common, so you'll have the most well known bugs ;-) and most TinyOS components will be written with them in mind. Of the old models, the ATmega based nodes, like the Mica family, tend to have more flash and less RAM than their MSP430 based counterparts. The MSP430 is probably more energy efficient, but this is usually not such a criticial aspect in a testbed where nodes are powered through USB anyway. I think you can still get telosb and micaZ nodes (or clones thereof), and there's several manufacturers of new models. For example, there's the Zolertia Z1 <http://www.zolertia.com/products/Z1> and our own G-Node <http://www.sownet.nl/index.php/en/products/gnode> . The Z1 uses the "classic" CC2420 <http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/cc2420.html> radio, so you can talk to several other brands of nodes. Of course, I think our G-Node is much nicer :-) The CC1101 <http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/cc1101.html> radio chip is very nice to work with, and it's very convenient to be able to plug your nodes straight into a USB port. I've got a 7-port hub on my desk as a mini-testbed :-) It's also the same hardware as we use in the field (albeit in a different form factor), so both the hardware and our TinyOS software stack are very well tested. ... well, that's my advertising quota for today :-P If you're going to have several types of nodes, make sure the radios are compatible! I think the RF230 and CC2420 can talk to each other, both speaking 802.15.4. The CC1101 isn't really compatible with anything else, but it's just a very nice radio to work with, both in production and for low level work like MAC protocols. In terms of software, I don't think there's much standardization there. Most people seem to set up their own management tools. Our testbed comes with TU Delft's software, which allows you to flash groups of nodes over the network, capture their serial output, etc. Since they're open sourcing it, it may be available for other nodes as well, but I can't say for sure. Well, that's all I've got for now, hopefully it's of some use to you! Kind regards, Michiel From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kavitha Sent: donderdag 18 november 2010 9:55 To: [email protected] Subject: [Tinyos-help] Lab Equipment Hai!! Am a newbie to TinyOS and am planning my research in Data management in Wireless Sensor Network. We want to set up a lab to simulate the real environement of WSN. Can anyone suggest me the equipment details. How many motes would be needed? ?Which motes to start with any softwares that need to be procured so as to write a proposal to the funding agency. -- Regards, Kavitha.
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