A Cooja-based tool for maintaining sensor network coverage requirements in a building

Abstract

Contiki's Cooja is a very popular Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) simulator, but it lacks support for modelling sensing coverage. We introduce WSN-Maintain, a Cooja-based tool for maintaining coverage requirements in an in-building WSN. To analyse the coverage of a building, WSN-Maintain takes as input the floorplan of the building, the coverage requirement of each region and the locations of sensor nodes. We take account of the heterogeneity of device specifications in terms of communication capability and sensing coverage. WSN-Maintain is run in parallel with the collect-view tool of Contiki, which was integrated into the Cooja simulator. We show that WSN-Maintain is able to automatically turn on redundant nodes to maintain the coverage requirement when active nodes fail and report failures that require physical maintenance. This tool allows us to evaluate different approaches to maintain coverage, including deferring physical maintenance to reduce operational costs.