17th introduction to wireless sensor simulators other than tossim

This Digest self-Research Progress Report

Because tossim can only run the same code on all nodes, it obviously does not meet our requirements. The following simulators are available for research:

As we recommend e, all simulated nodes run the same application code on tossim, that is to say every node must run the same code.

I checked so far alternatives:

 

1.Avrora (Http://compilers.cs.ucla.edu/avrora/)

Avrora, a research project of the ulinoleic compilers group, is a set of simulation and analysis tools for programs written for the AVR Microcontroller produced by atmel and the Mica2 sensor nodes. avrora contains a flexible framework for simulating and analyzing Assembly programs, providing a clean Java API and infrastructure for experimentation, profiling, and analysis.

Avrora, a cycle-accurate instructionlevel sensor network simulator which scales to networks of up to 10,000 nodes (its scalability seems meet our requirement .) and performs as much as 20 times faster than previous simulators (not tossim, I think it is NS-2 or something) with equivalent accuracy, handling as ready as 25 nodes in real-time. I believed tossim is the fastest simulator on tinyos so far. I did not find any description on its heterogeneous compatibility.

 

2.Viptos (Http://ptolemy.berkeley.edu/viptos/) (Tinyos-based)

Viptos-visual interface between Ptolemy and tinyos

It has the following advantages:

Graphical development and simulation environment for tinyos-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Transforms the dimo-into a nesc Program

Extends the capabilities of tossim to allow simulation of Heterogeneous Networks

Allows application developers to easily transition between high-level simulation of algorithms to low-level implementation and Simulation

 

Viptos extends the capabilities of tossim to allow simulation of heterogeneous networks. viptos provides a bridge between visualsense and tossim by providing interrupt-level simulation of actual tinyos programs, with packet-level simulation of the network, while allowing the developer to use other models of computation available in Ptolemy II for modeling the physical environment and other parts of the system. this framework allows application developers to easily transition between high-level simulation of algorithms to low-level implementation and simulation. they integrated the NESC/tinyos/tossim and Ptolemy II programming and execution models.

 

The best advantage is that the tool is also developed by UC Berkeley and some of the same researchers of tinyos (tossim ?). So its compatibility may be better than others. Especially, they mentioned that the tool can extend tossim.

 

3.Emstar and emtos (Http://www.cvs.cens.ucla.edu/emstar/ref/emtos.html) (Tinyos-based)

 

Emstar is a software system for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks involving Linux-based platforms. as the wireless sensor network community has attempted to deploy more complex designs --- large-scale, long-lived systems that need self-organization and adaptivity --- a number of difficult software design issues have arisen. advances in software design have not kept pace with the capabilities of hardware. this is because designing for an adaptive, efficient, and useful sensor network has turned out to be surprisingly complex and difficult. emstar is a Linux-based software framework, whose goal is to dramatically reduce this complexity, enabling work to be shared and reused, and simplifying and speeding the design of new sensor network applications.

 

Emtos allows developers to compile NESC code as an emstar binary, and debug tinyos applicatoins using the full suite of emstar debugging facilities.

 

The emstar platform is a new platform target for motes that is similar toPCPlatform. it allows code written against the tinyos API to run in an emstar environment, in any mode from deployment to "emulation" to pure simulation. this is achieved through a stub layer called "emtos ".

It seems good, however, I cannot find any scalability information on their documentations.

 

4.Prowler (tinyos-based)

 

Networked embedded systems (nest) are large-scale distributed systems with resource limited processing nodes tightly coupled to physical processes via sensors and actuators. applications running on this distributed platform are strongly affected by the communication channel. simulators are capable of simulating the behavior of the devices, but usually don't simulate the effects of the communication channels. however, imperfect wireless communication channels greatly affect the performance of the applications, so it is necessary to induplicate ate in the simulators to get accurate results. prowler is a probabilistic Wireless Network Simulator capable of simulating wireless distributed systems, from the application to the physical communication layer.

 

Prowler, running under MATLAB, provides an easy way of application prototyping with nice visualization capabilities. Although prowler provides a generic simulation environment, its current target platform is the Berkeley mica mote running tinyos.

 

I did not look through deeply, but I did not find any heterogeneous network information on their documentations.

 

5.NS-2 is not suitable for our case.

Using NS-2 as a WSN simulator has some drawbacks. first, sensing model does not exist. second, packet formats and MAC protocols are different from those found on typical WSN platforms. third, energy model is too simple.

 

NS-2 is not good for large scale simulation, it only supports up to 300 nodes.