Simulation Tool of Large-scale Sensor Networks

With the development of MEMS and wireless communication, the sensor network has become a hot research topic. Simulation is an effective approach which has been widely adopted by the researchers to evaluate the performance of networks. So far, a series of simulation tools have been developed to ease the design and deployment of network protocols. Most of these simulators are established for traditional wired or wireless networks, yet thery cannont fulfill the requirements of modeling the sensor network precisely and running large scale experiments efficiently.

System Architecture

We present a new simulator, namely EasiSim, for sensor networks on a large scale. EasiSim is featured by a structure-based modeling method and a hierarchical organization of the relevant functional components, including nodes, topology and scenario. The nodes are organized into a three-dimensional sorted list (3D list), which enables the node to process all the concurrent events in one batch, and therefore the running time may be reduced by an order of magnitude. Integrated with the other two upper layer components, which are topology and scenario, the proposed node organization method based on the 3D list makes the simulator not only scalable but also extensible. Moreover, we propose a visualization scheme based on a Client/Server model which separates the graphical user interface (GUI) from the simulation engine, and therefore the scalability of the simulator will not be decreased.

Approaches/Experiments

The performance of EasiSim is evaluated through extensive simulations and compared with ns -2 in terms of real running time and memory usage . The results showed that EasiSim takes less time and less memory than ns-2 to complete simulations with the same number of nodes during the same configured simulation time.

Accomplishments

1. Haiming Chen, Changcheng Huang and Li Cui. Lightweight Protocol Suite for Wireless Sensor Networks: Design and Evaluation. The 7th International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies (ICSIT2007), Page 1155-1160, Sydney, Australia, Oct. 2007.
2. Haiming Chen, Li Cui, He Zhu and Changcheng Huang. EasiSim: A Scalable Simulation Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks. The 13th IEEE International Workshop on Computer-Aided Modeling, Analysis and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD2008) in conjunction with IEEE ICC 2008, Beijing, China, May, 2008.

Future Directions

We plan to extend the modules, including the radio channel modules, the environment modules and the networking protocol modules, to make the simulator support for modeling the sensor networks more precisely. A practical battery and energy module is also supposed to be implemented in the future days, since it is of vital importance for modeling the power efficiencies of different protocols and life time of the sensor nodes.