Two out of four protocols on the networking stack have been successfully implemented, and were demonstrated on Monday. Furthermore, I changed the packet format (we were using inefficient strings to encode packet information before), therefore increasing the scalability of the code substantially. We are slightly behind schedule, as I had expected to have written the RX/TX schedule last week after the demo on Monday. Nevertheless, I am now much more confident in the robustness of the code, and am sure that we will be able to accomplish at least the schedule-distribution phase of the protocol at the end of next week. I have also been working on making the network robust to node failure: essentially detecting if neighboring nodes are unresponsive during the STP phase (phase 1) of the protocol, and ignoring these nodes during the LSA phase (phase 2). Right now, the gateway node is informed of the overall topology. We have split up the work of the next phase into three items:
- Creating the schedule based on the WSN tree-topology (via an adjacency list).
- Distributing the schedule to all nodes across the spanning tree
- Synchronizing nodes using a pre-computed fixed delay
We plan on accomplishing these three items in the coming week, after which we will be much more on track (as according to our Gantt chart).