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A novel approach of a test environment for embedded networking nodes has been conceptualized and implemented. Its basis is the use of virtual nodes in a PC environment, where each node executes the original embedded code. Different nodes run in parallel, connected via so-called virtual channels. The environment allows to modifying the behavior of the virtual channels as well as the overall topology during runtime to virtualize real-life networking scenarios. The presented approach is very efficient and allows a simple description of test cases without the need of a network simulator. Furthermore, it speeds up the process of developing new features as well as it supports the identification of bugs in wireless communication stacks. In combination with powerful test execution systems, it is possible to create a continuous development and integration flow.
Climate change and resultant scarcity of water are becoming major challenges for countries around the world. With the advent of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in the last decade and a relatively new concept of Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems developers are now working on designing control and automation systems that are lower in cost and more sustainable than the existing telemetry systems for monitoring. The Indus river basin in Pakistan has one of the world's largest irrigation systems and it is extremely challenging to design a low-cost embedded system for monitoring and control of waterways that can last for decades. In this paper, we present a hardware design and performance evaluation of a smart water metering solution that is IEEE 802.15.4-compliant. The results show that our hardware design is as powerful as the reference design, but allows for additional flexibility both in hardware and in firmware. The indigenously designed solution has a power added efficiency (PAE) of 24.7% that is expected to last for 351 and 814 days for nodes with and without a power amplifier (PA). Similarly, the results show that a broadband communication (434 MHz) over more than 3km can be supported, which is an important stepping stone for designing a complete coverage solution of large-scale waterways.
OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is already a well-known concept used widely in the automation industry. In the area of factory automation, OPC UA models the underlying field devices such as sensors and actuators in an OPC UA server to allow connecting OPC UA clients to access device-specific information via a standardized information model. One of the requirements of the OPC UA server to represent field device data using its information model is to have advanced knowledge about the properties of the field devices in the form of device descriptions. The international standard IEC 61804 specifies EDDL (Electronic Device Description Language) as a generic language for describing the properties of field devices. In this paper, the authors describe a possibility to dynamically map and integrate field device descriptions based on EDDL into OPCUA.
The Thread protocol is a recent development based on 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4), but with extensions regarding a more media independent approach, which – additionally – also promises true interoperability. To evaluate and analyse the operation of a Thread network a given open source 6LoWPAN stack for embedded devices (emb::6) has been extended in order to comply with the Thread specification. The implementation covers Mesh Link Establishment (MLE) and network layer functionality as well as 6LoWPAN mesh under routing mechanism based on MAC short addresses. The development has been verified on a virtualization platform and allows dynamical establishment of network topologies based on Thread's partitioning algorithm.
A novel approach of a testbed for embedded networking nodes has been conceptualized and implemented. It is based on the use of virtual nodes in a PC environment, where each node executes the original embedded code. Different nodes are running in parallel and are connected via so-called virtual interfaces. The presented approach is very efficient and allows a simple description of test cases without the need of a network simulator. Furthermore, it speeds up the process of developing new features.