DES Testbed Management System (DES-TBMS)

Experimentation in testbed environments is more complicated for researchers than using for example a network simulator. Many challenges, such as node access, correct timing, external influences like interference have to be considered throughout the experiment design, execution, and analysis. Additionally, researchers usually execute experiments manually, a labor-intensive and error-prone task, since there is no reliable automation of the overall experimentation process.

The Distributed Embedded Systems Testbed Management System (DES-TBMS) for the automation of experimentation in wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks is meant to ease the process of experimentation for the researcher. DES-TBMS consists of several components, each being responsible for specific tasks in the experimentation process. The different tasks include the following:

Definition of experiment descriptions in a standardized format
Scheduling and management of experiments
Automatic execution of experiments
Distributed monitoring of the network nodes during an experiment
A visualization tool to display the state of the testbed
An evaluation tool to compute performance metrics from collected experiment data