Robust topology formation using BTnodes

Research of the past years has brought about many new developments and proposals for wireless sensor networks, mostly in the areas of algorithms and theory, backed up by extensive simulation work. In order to fully understand the complexity of these issues from a system perspective we will highlight the idiosyncracies of multi-hop networking implemented on real devices. The BTnode is an autonomous wireless communication and computing platform based on a Bluetooth radio and a microcontroller aimed at fast prototyping and research in mobile computing. The TreeNet example implements a self-healing, distributed Bluetooth Scatternet formation on the BTnode platform. We will discuss our example implementation including devices used, prerequisites, limitations, algorithmic ideas and implementation results.