WiEmu: The Design and Implementation of a Flexible Agent-Based Scalable Network Emulator for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract. The accuracy of the simulation results which are calculated from the current network simulators is suspicious when compared to real network’s test-bed. Thus there is a great need to a low cost solution that gives accurate results and takes into consideration the special needs of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we try to overcome the limitations of network simulation by the incorporation of network emulation. The proposed agent-based wireless sensor networks emulator WiEmu achieves high fidelity results by emulating the hardware architecture of the wireless sensor motes. More specifically it has the ability of running heterogeneous wireless sensor network: software, operating systems, and applications transparently unmodified. Experiments show that the proposed emulator accurately models the behavior of the sensor mote. Results also indicate that the proposed emulator performs well especially when the motes tend to sleep most of time