Towards Understanding Bugs in WSN Applications

Towards Understanding Bugs in WSN Applications

Software quality of sensor network programs plays a critical role in the application of WSNs (Wireless sensor networks). However, due to severe resource constraint on nodes, node programs typically lack of system protection mechanism for hardware access, synchronization mechanism for concurrency executions, dynamic type detection mechanism, and so on. As a result, WSN applications are error-prone. Thus, it is important to analyze various common bugs in WSN applications and then develop bug-detection techniques for them. Currently, no work has been conducted to comprehensively analyze multiple types of bugs in WSN programs, nor offer a benchmark suite to evaluate bug-detection techniques for them. In this paper, multiple types of bugs, which are collected from research papers or development community of WSN programs, are comprehensively analyzed. The bugs’ characteristics are systematically described, including causes, patterns and repairing strategies. To facilitate the bug-detecting research on TinyOS programs, a benchmark suite involving the above bugs is created, which includes buggy programs, fixed programs and test cases.