Implementing an autonomic architecture for fault-tolerance in a wireless sensor network testbed for at-scale experimentation

The wireless sensor networking (WSN) community has increasingly grown to rely on experimentation with large-scale test-beds as a means of verifying protocols, middleware and applications. These testbeds need to be highly available in order to support this community, but are themselves complex, and complex to manage, being prone to faults in hardware, software specification and software implementation. In this paper we report on our experience in designing Kansei, a WSN testbed for experimentation at scale, to be autonomic - i.e. self-healing and self-managing. We implement autonomic management in Kansei through an architecture that consists of a hierarchy of self-contained components, extended with detectors for discovering faults and correctors for subsequent stabilization. We find that our invariant based architecture is well suited for large complex systems with unpredictable fault model and its fault monitoring framework can be extended to include user programs.