Abstract
The testing of programs in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an important means to assure quality but is a challenging process. As pervasive computing has been identified as a notable trend in computing, investigations on effective software testing techniques for WSN are essential. In particular, energy is a crucial and scarce resource in WSN nodes. Programs running correctly but failing to meet the energy constraints may still be problematic. As such, testing techniques for power-aware applications are useful; otherwise, the quickly depleted device batteries will need frequent replacements, hence challenging the effectiveness of automation. Since current testing techniques do not consider the issue of energy constraints, their automation in the WSN domain warrants further investigation.
This paper proposes a novel power-aware technique built on top of the notion of metamorphic testing to alleviate both the test oracle issue and the power-awareness issue. It tests the functions of programs in WSN nodes that are in close proximity, and uses the data consolidation criteria of data aggregation in programs as the basis for verifying test results. The power-aware transmissions of intermediate and final test data as well as the computation required for verification of test results are directly supported by the WSN programs. Our proposed technique has been strategically designed to blend in with the special features of the WSN environment.
This work is supported in part by a grant of the Innovation and Technology Commission in Hong Kong (Project No. ITS/076/06), a grant of City University of Hong Kong (Project No. 7200079), a discovery grant of the Australian Research Council (Project No. DP0771733), and CERG grants of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project Nos. 612306 and 717506).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
FHSST physics electricity: nonlinear conduction. Wikibook. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics_Electricity:Nonlinear_conduction
JUnit. http://www.junit.org
TinyOS. http://www.tinyOS.net
Berstel, J., Reghizzi, S.C., Roussel, G., San Pietro, P.: A scalable formal method for design and automatic checking of user interfaces. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 14(2), 124–167 (2005)
Binder, R.V.: Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools. Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts (2000)
Chan, F.T., Chen, T.Y., Cheung, S.C., Lau, M.F., Yiu, S.M.: Application of metamorphic testing in numerical analysis. In: SE 1998. Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 191–197. ACTA Press, Calgary, Canada (1998)
Chan, W.K., Chen, T.Y., Lu, H., Tse, T.H., Yau, S.S.: Integration testing of context-sensitive middleware-based applications: a metamorphic approach. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 16(5), 677–703 (2006)
Chen, T.Y., Huang, D.H., Tse, T.H., Zhou, Z.Q.: Case studies on the selection of useful relations in metamorphic testing. In: JIISIC 2004. Proceedings of the 4th Ibero-American Symposium on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, pp. 569–583. Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain (2004)
Heidemann, J., Silva, F., Intanagonwiwat, C., Govindan, R., Estrin, D., Ganesan, D.: Building efficient wireless sensor networks with low-level naming. In: SOSP 2001. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 146–159. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Kandler, J.: Automated testing of embedded software. In: STAREAST 2000. International Conference on Software Testing Analysis and Review, Orlando, Florida (2000), Paper available at http://www.stickyminds.com/s.asp?F=S2049_ART_2
Kapfhammer, G.M., Soffa, M.L., Mosse, D.: Testing in resource constrained execution environments. In: ASE 2005. Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 418–422. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Levis, P., Lee, N., Welsh, M., Culler, D.: TOSSIM: accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications. In: SenSys 2003. Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, ACM Press, New York (2001)
Sanvido, M.A.A., Cechticky, V., Schaufelberger, W.: Testing embedded control systems using hardware-in-the-loop simulation and temporal logic. In: Proceedings of the 15th IFAC World Congress on Automatic Control, Barcelona, Spain (2002)
Tsai, W.-T., Yu, L., Zhu, F., Paul, R.: Rapid embedded system testing using verification patterns. IEEE Software 22(4), 68–75 (2005)
Tse, T.H., Lau, F.C.M., Chan, W.K., Liu, P.C.K., Luk, C.K.F.: Testing object-oriented industrial software without precise oracles or results. Communications of the ACM (to appear)
Tse, T.H., Yau, S.S., Chan, W.K., Lu, H., Chen, T.Y.: Testing context-sensitive middleware-based software applications. In: COMPSAC 2004. Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference, vol. 1, pp. 458–465. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California (2004)
Werner-Allen, G., Swieskowski, P., Welsh, M.: MoteLab: a wireless sensor network testbed. In: IPSN 2005. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, pp. 483–488. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California (2005)
Xie, Q., Memon, A.: Designing and comparing automated test oracles for GUI-based software applications. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (to appear)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chan, W.K., Chen, T.Y., Cheung, S.C., Tse, T.H., Zhang, Z. (2007). Towards the Testing of Power-Aware Software Applications for Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Abdennadher, N., Kordon, F. (eds) Reliable Software Technologies – Ada Europe 2007. Ada-Europe 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4498. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73230-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73230-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73229-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73230-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)