Introduction and overview of capabilities

TKN Wireless Indoor Sensor network Testbed (TWIST)

The TKN Wireless Indoor Sensor network Testbed (TWIST), developed by the Telecommunication Networks Group (TKN) at the Technische Universität Berlin, is a scalable and flexible testbed architecture for experimenting with wireless sensor network applications in an indoor setting. The TWIST instance deployed at the TKN group includes 204 sensor nodes and spans three floors of the FT building on the TU Berlin campus, resulting in more than 1500 square meters of instrumented office space. TWIST can be used locally or remotely via a webinterface.

Additonal components

In addition to TWIST, which is a fixed testbed infrastructure, CREW experiments involving mobility can be carried out in the TKN premises using additional equipment. The use of this equipment requires additional support at the TKN premises. This can be achieved either by experimenters beeing present at the premisises or by additional support from TWIST staff.

The additional components are:

• 2 mobile robots: Turtlebot-II based on Kobuki mobile base and a Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor. The robot runs ROS (an open-source, meta-operating system) and it can be programmed to follow certain trajectories in the TWIST building. Shimmer2 sensor nodes or WiSpy devices (see below) can be mounted on the robot, e.g. to record RF environmental maps, or perform experiments emulating body area networks (BANs) as well as experiments involving interaction between a mobile network and the fixed TWIST infrastructure.
• 8 Shimmer2 nodes, which are wearable sensor nodes similar to the popular TelsoB platform and can be attached to a person (or robot).
• 10 WiSpy 2.4x USB Spectrum Analyzers, which are low-cost devices to scan RF noise in the 2.4 GHz ISM band.
• 3 ALIX2D2 embedded PCs equipped with Broadcom WL5011S 802.11b/g cards.