Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are notoriously difficult to get right, partly due to the fact that their low-power wireless communication is greatly affected by the characteristics of the target environment. An early in-field connectivity assessment of the latter provides fundamental input to the WSN development.
TRIDENT is a tool, expressly designed to support in-field connectivity assessment by relying only on the WSN nodes, without additional infrastructure (e.g. USB cables). It is easy to use, enabling domain experts (instead of WSN experts) to directly configure connectivity assessment towards their specific needs, without requiring any coding.
The tool might be helpful if you plan a new WSN deployment, to detect the best places for the nodes, or if you want to assist connectivity of an existing network. Despite the original motivation of running experiments in forests and mountains, TRIDENT is suitable and have been already used to experiment with in-door deployments.
TRIDENT currently supports two low-power wireless hardware platforms: TMote Sky with an integrated CC2420 radio chip and Waspmote with ZigBee-compliant XBee S2 module based on EM250 SoC.
In addition to probing the wireless links, TRIDENT can sample temperature and humidity (currently only on TMote platform) during the experiments to enable studies of the effect of environmental conditions on link quality.
TRIDENT has been used in the following projects: Triton, ACube, EIT ICT Labs CPS Project.
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