Towards a Versatile Problem Diagnosis Infrastructure for LargeWireless Sensor Networks

In this position paper, we address the issue of durable maintenance of a wireless sensor network, which will be crucial if the vision of large, long-lived sensornets is to become reality. Durable maintenance requires tools for diagnosing and fixing occurring problems, which can range from internode connectivity losses, to time synchronization problems, to software bugs. While there are solutions for fixing problems, an appropriate diagnostic infrastructure is essentially still lacking. We argue that diagnosing a sensornet application requires the ability to dynamically and temporarily extend the application on a selected group of nodes with virtually any functionality. We motivate this claim based on deployment experiences to date and propose a highly nonintrusive solution to dynamically extending a running application on a resource-constrained sensor node.