SMoT

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming vital to a wide range of application domains, from precision agriculture and smart buildings to health systems and monitoring of humans, animals, crowds and robots. In particular, there is an increasing number of sensor devices that are worn by persons who interact with them on a daily basis. In these applications, networks are formed by the persons who wear the sensor devices and as a result the mobility comes from them. This results in new protocols and applications for this kind of networks and new challenges arise. Human factors are crucial aspects in this case and researchers should consider them in their designs. The protocols and applications developed, should be tested and verified before their final deployment. We argue that a testbed, exposing the human characteristics is needed. In this thesis, we define the fundamental requirements that a testbed for experimentation with human-centric wireless networks must fulfil. We design and implement a fully functional testbed that allows researchers to run experiments in a realistic and controlled testing environment. We show that our testbed has the appropriate features and tools to make the running of the experiments easy and effortless. In addition, our testbed gives the ability to the researchers to observe how human diversity and variability (like body orientation or walking speed) affect their work. Furthermore, we evaluated the mechanisms of our testbed and present how they affect the execution of an experiment.