MagicLink: Weaving multi-site wireless sensor networks for large-scale experiments

Abstract

Despite the promising vision of pervasive sensor networks of thousands of nodes, conducting such large-scale experiments on demand is still far from reality due to the limitations of resources, space, and maintenance. To address such challenges, we propose the MagicLink middleware to "magically" weave geographically distributed sensor networks into a large-scale sensor network testbed. MagicLink is a key part of the OKGems remotely programmable cyber-physical system project under the GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) initiative; and MagicLink is designed to enable shared "clouds" of sensors for sensor network research and experiments at scale and on demand. Specifically, MagicLink has the following salient features: (1) seamless integration of multi-site sensor networks offering elastic and scalable testbeds; (2) online adaptive simulation that adopts a realistic radio model making the cross-site Internet connection behave like a one-hop sensor network link in real environment; (3) component-based design allowing easy integration with user applications. To the best of our knowledge, MagicLink is the first solution to enable "almost-real" large-scale sensor network experiments across sites. In this paper, we present MagicLink's system architecture and subsystem design. We demonstrate the usability and fidelity of MagicLink through experimental results with representative applications on a two-site testbed. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.