MoteWorks
Crossbow’s MoteWorks [6] consists of three layers. The
Mote Tier at sensor level supports self-organising networking
to connect all nodes within range to the server by using the
XMesh software [7] installed at the motes. The Server Tier
runs XServe software [8] handling data translation and storage
and providing interfaces for the client applications. At the
Client Tier every application using XServe interfaces is able
to gather and analyse data provided by the network. Crossbow
provides MoteView [5] as a full-featured data analysing application
and MoteConfig [4] as programming utility on the client
side. Advantages of MoteWorks are the full support for the
whole Crossbow sensor hardware product line, an optimized
development environment and a sophisticated user interface,
providing charts, health monitoring and data conversion to engineering
units. MoteView for example provides temperature
values in degree Celsius, Fahrenheit or Kelvin, acceleration
in m/s2 or g units and gives status information about forward
queues, dropped packets, retries, battery or path.
On the other hand MoteWorks also has some disadvantages.
It sticks to TinyOS 1.x, which makes it hard to extend. It also
restricts packet size to 55 byte whereas TinyOS would allow
up to 235 byte. The software provides only a small command
set to gather data in trivial way by simply defining a sensing
interval. And even this is restricted to a minimum interval of
300ms [6] whereas several applications, especially for sound
and acceleration need a higher sampling rate which actually
is supported by the hardware. Finally it has to be stated that
the provided framework is profound (manuals have about 500
pages), not application specific by nature and therefore hard to
adopt to specific needs. All these disadvantages are probably
the reason no research projects so far base on MoteWorks.