Kansei Dependable Distributed and Networked Systems

Kansei GENI: The Next Generation Sensor Testbed for At-Scale Experiments

Overview

Testbed

Kansei is a testbed of 210 Extreme Scale Motes (XSM) hooked individually onto 210 Extreme Scale Stargates (XSS). The stargates are connected using both wired and wireless ethernet. Kansei provides a testbed infrastructure to conduct experiments with 802.11b networking and XSMs. It was initially conceived to test the middleware services for the Tier-2 network of the Extreme Scale (ExScal) project funded by DARPA. The Kansei project is headed by Anish Arora.

















Equipment

The Backbone Network Node

Each XSM is directly connected to a Stargate. This allows the Kansei interface to directly program each XSM (and XSS) over a wired connection. The Stargate is a 32-bit class device purchased from CrossBow running Stargate Release 7.2 from Intel Research. The stargates in use were customized for the ExScal project by adding 802.11b Wireless Networking cards (SMC2532W-B) with requisite software (HostAP), external antennas, and device housings. Kansei makes use of the EmStar stargate development environment.


The Sensor-Actuator Nodes

XSMs are used as the sensing and actuating nodes in the testbed. They were were designed specifically for the ExScal project by The Ohio State University and CrossBow Technology, and manufactured by CrossBow Technology. They feature a variety of sensors and actuators including a magnetometer, a microphone, four passive infrared receivers, a photocell, a sounder, and feedback LEDs. Kansei allows one to run user defined experiments on the XSMs through the web interface. For experiments requiring a more interesting environment than a mostly empty warehouse can provide the experiments can rely on data collected elsewhere with a mobile XSM array and injected into the system.

Figure 2.1: A stargate XSM pair
Fig. 1