Octopus: Monitoring, Visualization and Control of Sensor Networks

Sensor network monitoring and control are currently addressed separately through specialized tools. However, the high degree of coupling of network state to the physical environment in which the network is deployed demands that users can monitor the network and respond to network state changes continuously. This paper presents the open-source Octopus visualization and control tool. Octopus is a protocol-independent tool that provides live information about the network topology and sensor data in order to enable live debugging of deployed sensor networks. It enables operators to reconfigure the network behavior, such as switching between time-driven, event-driven, and query-driven modes or between awake and sleep modes of one, many, or all nodes through its graphical interface.