KleeNet: discovering insidious interaction bugs in wireless sensor networks before deployment

Complex interactions and the distributed nature of wireless sensor networks make automated testing and debugging before deployment a necessity. A main challenge is to detect bugs that occur due to non-deterministic events, such as node reboots or packet duplicates. Often, these events have the potential to drive a sensor network and its applications into corner-case situations, exhibiting bugs that are hard to detect using existing testing and debugging techniques. In this paper, we present KleeNet, a debugging environment that effectively discovers such bugs before deployment. KleeNet executes unmodified sensor network applications on symbolic input and automatically injects non-deterministic failures. As a result, KleeNet generates distributed execution paths at high-coverage, including low-probability cornercase situations. As a case study, we integrated KleeNet into the Contiki OS and show its effectiveness by detecting four insidious bugs in the µIP TCP/IP protocol stack. One...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: IPSN
• Authors: Raimondas Sasnauskas, Olaf Landsiedel, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, Carsten Weise, Stefan Kowalewski, Klaus Wehrle
• Keywords: Debugging, IPSN 2010, Sensor Networks, Wireless Sensor Networks