A Real-time Network Monitoring Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the wide applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the network working condition monitoring gets more and more important and becomes a research hotspot. For network analysis, it is crucial to obtain the real-time network parameters while the network is working. This paper introduces a network monitoring technique based on sniffing. A sniffer is used to capture the data packets sent by the surrounding nodes. The received data packets can be used to analyze the working condition of the WSN. The proposed real-time network monitoring technique is tested in a student dorm building equipped with electric power supply meters. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is reliable to achieve our goals. The proposed technique is a good tool to study the delay, RSSI, and packet loss of a WSN.