Whitefield provides a simulation environment for wireless sensor network by combining realistic RF simulation with the native mode use of popular IoT stacks/OSes such as Contiki/RIOT/OpenThread/Zephyr/FreeRTOS/OT-RTOS. Thus one can use existing stack implementation as is and test it on top of realistic RF simulation.

Whitefield uses PHY/MAC layer provided by popular simulators (such as NS3-lrwpan) and loosely couples it with the constrained network stacks supported by popular IoT OSes, thus providing the best of both worlds by simply glueing things. It provides common visualization and OAM tools (logs, pcap, shell) which simplifies monitoring and troubleshooting.

Typical use-cases of Whitefield:

1. Large scale interop testing between multitudes of stacks in same wireless environment. It can scale to thousands of nodes on general purpose server (even laptops).
2. Validate RF physical/mac simulation against each other. For e.g. compare results in NS3 vs Castalia
3. Regression tests using IdealAir(future).
4. Help in creating reproducible work. Most of the experiments mentioned in the papers are difficult to be reproduced. Whitefield could help alleviate this issue.

In the future, would like to create standard topology harnesses for various scenarios and make it possible to test various implementations/protocols against each other.

Terminology:

Airline: Airline refers to PHY/MAC/RDC implementation provided by third-party simulators such as NS3/Castalia-Omnet++. Provides configuration management and OAM tools which works across any third-party simulators. It interfaces with Commline to send/recv messages to/from Stackline.

Commline: Message queue and corresponding interfaces which decouples Airline and Stackline. All the messages, be it the network payloads or OAM messages are transported using Commline.

Stackline: 6lowpan/Network layer and above protocol stack provided by third-party IoT OSes such as Contiki/RIOT. A new platform is added in such OSes to interface with Whitefield. The protocol stack with application will be used as-is from these OSes.

Setup Instructions

Tested on: Ubuntu >=16.04 (xenial), Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 (jessie)

System Requirements:

Disk Space: ~1.5GB Build Instructions:

Assumes Airline=NS3, Stackline=Contiki (example app=contiki/examples/ipv6/rpl-udp)

git clone https://github.com/whitefield-framework/whitefield
cd whitefield
git submodule update --init
git submodule foreach git pull origin master
./scripts/setup.sh

Execute Instructions:

#Start Whitefield
$./invoke_whitefield.sh config/wf.cfg

#Monitor whitefield status
$./scripts/monitor.sh

#View live network toplogy
$./canvas/canvas.py
#open http://localhost:8080/ in a browser

#Whitefield shell
$./scripts/wfshell help

#Stop whitefield
$./scripts/wfshell stop_whitefield

• Configuration manual

• OAM/Monitor command manual

• Using RIOT/Contiki with Whitefield

• Using OpenThread with Whitefield

• Whitefield compared to Cooja/NS3

• Module support table

• Forum

Work done in Whitefield

• RPL Efficient Route Invalidation

• 6Lo Fragment Forwarding