The development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) minimized the need for wired connections in modern life. Several challenges in wireless communication such as energy consumption, security, and quality of service should be provided in various real-time applications. For this reason, the wireless network should be self-management and should repair itself. Different software simulators of WSN are designed to model the real environmental conditions, but their results could be inaccurate. For a precise simulation, researchers use a hardware simulator known as testbed. They offer a realistic imitation for the real environment conditions. Based on different developed testbeds, a hardware platform was created with reasonable cost in order to improve the performances of WSN. The implemented testbed was designed by nine sensor nodes in matrix form, wired between each other with radio frequency (RF) links and edged with two attenuators. The value of the attenuation, which is created to imitate the real environment phenomenon, block most of the incident RF signal lower than the sensitivity level of the transceiver. The platform is equipped by RF switches connected directly to the sensor nodes. They ensure the communication with more than one node in the matrix as the radio transceiver has one input and output. The nodes should detect the malfunction in the RF link and choose an alternative path formed by their neighbors' nodes in the matrix to avoid the loss of data. Different algorithms were tested on the implemented testbeds to validate the desired simulation.
