Web Tool for Path Analysis in Wireless Sensor Networks to Improve Their Performance

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are based on tiny autonomous devices, usually named motes or nodes, and are used in many monitoring applications, such as environment, habitat, precision horticulture, etc. These motes are power-limited and most energy is wasted through the communication process when exchanging data packets. Because these motes are quite simple, with low power transmission and simple antennas, these networks usually run multihop routing protocols in order to forward packets between one mote to the sink, or the collector node, using the other motes as relaying motes. Basically, these routing protocols try to find out new routes within these wireless network, optimizing different criteria, such as number of hops, network life time, throughput, etc. However, if something is going wrong within the network (big interferences, problems in one node, unstable routes, etc.), due to the lack of information retrieved related to management purpose, it is difficult to fix it and many times the outcome is critical, leaving the network out of service. To avoid these issues, we show in this paper a web tool for path monitoring and analysis within the WSN in order to improve their performance and to plan ahead this kind of problems. In this paper, we show the different alternatives in the design of this tool and the different rules applied when trying to find out the inner problems in the network. In this kind of network, using the routing packets, we can get further information of the inner problems and infer them based on the statistics and rules applied.