Since the last status report, we focused mainly on integration amongst all of our individual parts. The web application now works with whatever data is provided to it via the json file generated by our network code. It is able to show all the links that are being used by the Spanning Tree Protocol and indicate what nodes are “caught on fire.” All the temperature sensors have been added to each of the nodes, so all the nodes are now completely constructed. The main bottleneck has been actually getting all eight nodes in the network to actually work. We are having issues with the packets communicating with one another. We are getting many errors and bugs related to transmissions between the nodes and are unsure of the origin of the errors. A lot of it seems to be timing issues and issues with retransmitting packets. We were having issues with testing the entire topology so we ended up paring it down to only four nodes to get that working reliably before scaling back up. Other than debugging, we have been working on our final presentation and prepping information that would need to be included in our final paper as well.
Rescoping:
There are a few things that are being rescoped in the context of our project. When we are doing our schedule distribution phase, we are assuming a certain amount of packet losses. So in the fixed time span from our Phase 3/Scheduling Phase to our Phase 4/Data Phase, we are planning on assuming that there are N packet errors only that can occur in that time frame. In addition, the web application isn’t going to be automatically reloaded every time the JSON file contains new data. The web application will be manually reloaded by a member of the team. We have also removed NTP from our protocols because we would not have finished that in one semester and would have taken much longer time.