Experimental Performance Evaluation of POBICOS Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks

The advances in the theory of wireless sensor networks have been remarkable during the past decades, but there is a lack of extensive experimental evaluations. In this paper we present performance-evaluation methods and results for POBICOS (platform for opportunistic behaviour in incompletely specified, heterogeneous object communities), which is an advanced middleware for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The measurements concern energy consumption, duty cycle, and OS task profiling as well as communication characteristics such as round trip time (RTT) and throughput. In addition, a bandwidth analysis during a long-term experiment of fully functional POBICOS network and application is studied. Based on the evaluation results, power mode and data cache improvements are presented as well as CPU clock frequency optimizations.