Rover: Poor (but Elegant) Man’s Testbed

International audienceThis paper presents the OpenVisualizer Rover testbed, a simple, easy-to-deploy and cheap testbed for the Internet of Things (IoT). The OpenWSN project provides a free and open-source implementation of a standards-compliant protocol stack for the IoT, as well as all the necessary network management and debugging tools. The network management software, OpenVisualizer, is portable across popular operating systems, and connects the OpenWSN low-power wireless mesh network to the Internet. In the current setup, motes are connected to the USB ports of the computer the OpenVisualizer runs on. The OpenVisualizer monitors the internal state of those motes, which it presents through a web interface. Rover extends the OpenVisualizer by allowing motes plugged into different computers to remotely connect to it. Once connected, a user monitors and manages the motes exactly as if they were connected locally. This offers endless experimentation possibilities, as the resulting testbed can be quickly (re)deployed in realistic environments. An example Rover testbed has been deployed at the Cisco Paris Innovation and Research Lab. This paper discusses the Rover architecture, the deployment, and the experimental research done with it