Short Description
D-Cube is a full-fledged distributed benchmarking facility that provides a consistent way to evaluate the performance of low-power wireless IoT systems. Hosted at the Institute of Technical Informatics at Graz University of Technology, D-Cube fully supports the automated testing of the reliability, timeliness, and energy consumption of low-power wireless communication protocols in a variety of settings. The primary audience of D-Cube are academic researchers and industry practitioners creating low-power wireless networking solutions that would like to quantitatively assess and compare their performance with that of other systems addressing the same class of applications. D-Cube also offers a database of other solutions from academic and industrial partners who have made use of the facility in the context of the EWSN Dependability Competition series.
The facility is currently installed over an area of 1440 m², with a total of 48 distributed measurement stations. Each measurement station supports up to four IoT platforms: as of March 2020, the popular TelosB mote and the Nordic Semiconductors nRF52840 are installed. D-Cube also allows to generate harsh RF conditions using JamLab-NG, and is hence well-suited for testing the performance of mesh networking and multi-hop communication solutions in the presence of radio interference.
Contact Person
Kay Römer
Research Services
- Dependability of low-power wireless IoT protocols and systems;
- Energy efficiency, reliability, and end-to-end latency of IoT applications.
Methods & Expertise for Research Infrastructure
D-Cube is a benchmarking facility built at the Institute of Technical Informatics of TU Graz in the context of the LEAD project “Dependable Internet of Things in Adverse Environments” in cooperation with Pro2Future. This facility is used to evaluate and debug the performance of newly-built low-power wireless protocols, as well as to systematically study and highlight the weaknesses of existing solutions. D-Cube has also been used as a basis to quantitatively compare the performance of the state-of-the-art at public events such as the EWSN Dependability Competition.
[2] M. Schuß, C.A. Boano, and K. Römer. Moving Beyond Competitions: Extending D-Cube to Seamlessly Benchmark Low-Power Wireless Systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Benchmarking Cyber-Physical Networks and Systems (CPSBench) in conjunction with CPSweek. Porto, Portugal. April 2018. http://www.carloalbertoboano.com/documents/schuss18benchmark.pdf
[3] M. Schuß, C.A. Boano, M. Weber, and K. Römer. A Competition to Push the Dependability of Low-Power Wireless Protocols to the Edge. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), ranked CORE A. Uppsala, Sweden. February 2017. http://www.carloalbertoboano.com/documents/schuss17competition.pdf