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Overview
Z-Monitor (ZM) is a free tool for monitoring and controlling IEEE 802.15.4 Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LOWPANs).
It provides a convenient solution for researchers and students for developing, debugging and deploying wireless sensor network applications based on LOWPANs.
The tool is compatible with the open-source official TinyOS implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 recently released by the TinyOS 15.4 WG. Z-Monitor has also been tested and validated with the open-ZB implementation.
Currently, Z-Monitor is available only for TelosB motes and will soon be extended to a wider range of COTS platforms.
Why Z-Monitor?
The motivation behind Z-Monitor is the fact that commercial products for monitoring and testing IEEE 802.15.4-compliant LOWPANs are too expensive and typically require special sniffing hardware. In addition, other generic-purpose sniffers such as WireShark and Ethereal are not specifically designed for IEEE 802.15.4-compliant networks. Z-Monitor provides a free solution that relies on the use of simple commercially available motes for sniffing traffic and monitoring IEEE 802.15.4-based LOWPANs.
The current version Z-Monitor 1.0 supports TelosB mote as the underlying sniffing hardware.
Features
Z-Monitor 1.0 provides a friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that supports the following features:
- Frame Decoding: it shows the details about received frames that pertain to the Physical and MAC layers with respect to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard specification. Two different GUIs were designed for Frame Decoding operation offering more flexibility to users for protocol analysis.
- Topology Visualization: it shows the logical topology of the network (parent-to-child relationship between nodes).
- Traffic Timeline: it shows the sequence of packet received over time.
- Packet Statistics: it provides useful statistics about number and type of packets received by the sniffer. Statistics can be saved in a file and analysed off-line.
- Star-based topology: the current version supports star-based topology as it is related to the Physical and MAC Layers of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard protocol. Multi-hop support is planned for next releases with support of ZigBee and 6LowPAN Network Layer protocols.
Future contributions
Z-Monitor will be open for contributions from the scientific community. Instructions on how to contribute will be announced soon. You can also send your suggestions to <dev at z-monitor dot org>.
Z-Monitor will be extended to provide more comprehensive features. Currently, we expect to provide the following contributions in the short-term future:
