EyeSec: A Retrofittable Augmented Reality Tool for Troubleshooting Wireless Sensor Networks in the Field
This addresses the lack of dedicated, portable tools for WSN operators to diagnose faults at deployment sites, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of troubleshooting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the field by introducing EyeSec, a retrofittable augmented reality tool that visualizes network topology and data flows using optical markers and portable sniffers, demonstrating a proof of concept on low-cost hardware with the 6LoWPAN protocol.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) often lack interfaces for remote debugging. Thus, fault diagnosis and troubleshooting are conducted at the deployment site. Currently, WSN operators lack dedicated tools that aid them in this process. Therefore, we introduce EyeSec, a tool for WSN monitoring and maintenance in the field. An Augmented Reality Device (AR Device) identifies sensor nodes using optical markers. Portable Sniffer Units capture network traffic and extract information. With those data, the AR Device network topology and data flows between sensor nodes are visualized. Unlike previous tools, EyeSec is fully portable, independent of any given infrastructure and does not require dedicated and expensive AR hardware. Using passive inspection only, it can be retrofitted to already deployed WSNs. We implemented a proof of concept on low-cost embedded hardware and commodity smart phones and demonstrate the usage of EyeSec within a WSN test bed using the 6LoWPAN transmission protocol.