This project aims at building a 16 channel IEEE802.15.4 sniffer that can be used for sniffing IEEE802.15.4e, WirelessHart and ISA100a networks to help with debugging.

16 channel IEEE802.15.4 sniffer

why 16 channels?

Channel Hopping is a technique proven to efficiently combat external interference and persistent multi-path fading. When using channel hopping, nodes send successive packets on different frequency channels, following a pseudo-random hopping pattern. With IEEE802.15.4-2006 hardware, 16 channels are available in the 2.4-2.485GHz frequency band.

Building a sniffer for such networks involves being able to listen to all 16 channels at the same time; this requires 16 radios.

hardware

In the first step of this project, we use 16 off-the-shelf  RZ USBstick boards by Atmel, connected to a single computer using USB hubs.

software

• running on the RZ USBstick boards: we use the firmware from the  WARPwING project.
• running on the host computer: we use the Python-based client software to retrieve packets received by the RZ USBstick boards, parse those packets according to XML packet field descriptors and display those packets.

Requirements

• a windows laptop (the automatic boards recognition only works with Windows)
• multiple (ideally 16) RAVEN board loaded with the  Warpwing firmware
•  Python 2.5.4 for Windows with the following packages
  •  pyserial-2.4.win32.exe, to read/write to serial ports
  •  elementtree-1.2.6-20050316.win32.exe to read/write XML data from files

supported header formats

IEEE802.15.4-2006	supported
IEEE802.15.4e extended header	in preparation
IPv6	in preparation
draft-ietf-6lowpan-hc-06	in preparation
draft-ietf-roll-rpl-04	in preparation
OpenADR	in preparation

Contact

This project is being championed by Boyang Zhang as part of his stay as an undergraduate researcher in  Prof. Kris Pister team,  Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Network,  EECS departement,  University of California, Berkeley.