Chapter 14
Modeling Sensor Networks Through Design and Simulation*
Design and programming problems are inherent to the understanding of the technology of sensor networks.
—S. S. Iyengar
Wireless sensor networks have the potential to become significant subsystems of engineering applications. Before relegating important and safety-critical tasks to such subsystems, it is necessary to understand the dynamic behavior of these subsystems in simulation environments. There is an urgent need to develop simulation platforms that are useful for exploring both the networking issues and the distributed computing aspects of wireless sensor networks. Current efforts to simulate wireless sensor networks focus largely on the networking issues. These approaches use well-known network simulation tools that are dificult to extend to explore distributed computing issues.
This chapter presents an architecture of a sensor simulator, and a sensor node that is used in the simulator. This chapter further emphasizes that OMNeT++ is a viable discrete-event simulation framework for studying both the networking aspects and the distributed computing aspects of sensor networks. We present the architecture of a sensor node that is used in the simulator and the general architecture of the simulator.
On the basis of our studies with the IEEE 802.11 MAC and directed diffusion integrated with GEAR, we conclude that our simulator is at least an order of magnitude faster than ns-2 and uses memory more eficiently than ...
