A simple visualization and programming framework for wireless sensor networks: PROVIZ

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly gaining popularity in various critical domains like health care, critical infrastructure, and climate monitoring, where application builders have diversified development needs for programming, visualization, and simulation tools. However, these tools are designed as separate stand-alone applications. To avoid the complexity of using multiple tools, we have designed a new extensible, multi-platform, scalable, and open-source framework called PROVIZ. PROVIZ is an integrated visualization and programming framework with the following features: PROVIZ includes (1) a visualization tool that can visualize heterogeneous WSN traffic (with different packet payload formats) by parsing the data received either from a packet sniffer (e.g., a sensor-based sniffer or a commercial TI SmartRF 802.15.4 packet sniffer) or from a simulator (e.g., OMNeT); (2) a scripting language based on the TinyOS sensor network platform that aims at reducing code size and improving programming efficacy; (3) an over-the-air programming tool to securely program sensor nodes; (4) a visual programming tool with basic sensor drag-and-drop modules for generating simple WSN programs; and (5) a visual network comparison tool that analyzes packet traces of two networks to generate a juxtaposed visual comparison of contrasting network characteristics. PROVIZ also includes built-in extensible visual demo deployment capabilities that allow users to quickly craft network scenarios and share them with other users. In this work, we introduce the various features of PROVIZ's visualization and programming framework, analyze test scenarios, and discuss how all the tools can be used in sync with each other to create an all-encompassing development and test environment.