Rapid protocol development in wireless sensor networks using Wireshark plugins

Abstract

When developing new protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) the ability to observe generated wireless traffic and inspect packets sent between sensor nodes is a crucial part of the process. In this work a new methodology is presented, in which a single protocol description in XML files can be a source of various data needed for protocol development and testing. A set of tools is presented that allows automated generation of headers in nesC language as well as protocol dissectors for Wireshark - a popular network analysing tool. Although the described technique has been mainly used for the development of WSN applications, the principles and details can also be applied to the development of any protocol-oriented applications on mobile computing platforms. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.