Visibility: a new metric for protocol design

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a new sensornet protocol design goal: visibility. Visibility into behaviors at the network level will simplify debugging and ease the development process. We argue that increasing visibility is the responsibility of the network protocols themselves, and not solely the responsibility of existing debugging tools. We describe a quantitative visibility metric to evaluate and compare protocols, where visibility is defined as the energy cost of diagnosing the cause of a behavior in a protocol. The design and evaluation of Pull Collection Protocol, a novel multi-hop collection protocol, is an example of how to design for visibility without sacrificing throughput or node-level fairness. We also describe our optimizations for an existing protocol, Deluge, to increase its visibility and efficiency.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
metrics, sensor networks, visibility