由於無線感測網路的實驗步驟相當煩雜，加上使用模擬器來模擬無線電傳輸，並沒辦法確切地表現訊號衰弱及干擾等因素，所以無線感測網路實驗平台的解決方案逐漸受到歡迎。在本篇論文中，我們設計並實作了一個分散式的無線感測網路實驗平台，使得研究人員可以上傳實驗作效能評估。此外，無線感測網路的研究人員注意到能量消耗的控制是一個很重要的設計考量，因此，評估能量消耗的狀況，必然成為實驗平台之一重要功能。我們設計一個以軟體為基礎，並以硬體輔助來求得感測節點的耗電，並將這個概念實作於我們的實驗平台 USTB (University System of Taiwan TestBed)上。我們分別利用我們的方法與示波器的測量做了幾個簡單的實驗，結果顯示其差別非常小，但是使用示波器來測量容易在識別示波器的波形時，產生主觀上的誤差。 此外，USTB允許我們佈署感測網路於不同的地點，而這些感測網路僅透過中央資料庫做將自我管理且彼此獨立。USTB 也為實驗平台的管理及使用上，提供了方便的、實用的、穩定的及可模組化的功能。 Due to the procedure of experiment in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is cumbersome and the network simulators cannot present the real effects of wireless communications such as signal fading and anisotropic propagation, the WSN testbeds become a good solution for performance evaluation. In this paper, we design and implement a distributed architecture for wireless sensor network testbed. Our testbed can deploy WSNs in different locations and connects them through the Internet and gateways. The testbed allows the researchers both to submit their experiments and get the reports of performance evaluation through web interface. In the outdoor applications, power consumption is an important metric to evaluate the performance of WSN protocols. In our testbed, we also propose a software-based with hardware-supported scheme to measure the energy consumption of sensor nodes for the experiments. We compare our estimations with the measurements from oscilloscope. The results show that the differences between our testbed and oscilloscope are slight. However, the measurements from oscilloscope may contain more errors than our scheme since the current waveform and its duration time are unstable.
