A Sensor, Environment and Network Simulator

Recent advances in micro electro-mechanical systems and VLSI lithography have enabled the miniaturization of sensors and controllers. Such minitiarization facili-tates the deployment of large-scale wireless sensor net-works (WSNs). However, the considerable cost of deploying and maintaining large-scale WSNs for experimental pur-poses makes simulation useful in developing dependable and portable WSN applications. SENS is a customizable sensor network simulator for WSN applications, consist-ing of interchangeable and extensible components for ap-plications, network communication, and the physical en-vironment. Multiple component implementations in SENS offer varying degrees of realism. Users can assemble application-specific environments; such environments are modeled in SENS by their different signal propagation char-acteristics. The same source code that is executed on sim-ulated sensor nodes in SENS may also be deployed on ac-tual sensor nodes; this enables application portability. Fur-thermore, SENS provides diagnostic facilities such as power utilization analysis for development of dependable applica-tions. We validate and demonstrate usability of these capa-bilities through analyzing two simple WSN services. 1