Experimental Evaluation of Simulation Abstractions for Wireless Sensor Network MAC Protocols

The evaluation ofMAC protocols forWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is often performed through simulation. These simulations necessarily abstract away from reality inmany ways. However, the impact of these abstractions on the results of the simulations has received only limited attention. Moreover, many studies on the accuracy of simulation have studied either the physical layer and per link effects or routing protocol effects. To the best of our knowledge, no other work has focused on the study of the simulation abstractions with respect toMAC protocol performance. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental study of two often used abstractions in the simulation ofWSN MAC protocols.We show that a simple SNR-based reception model can provide quite accurate results for metrics commonly used to evaluate MAC protocols. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of what the main sources of deviation are and thereby how the simulations can be improved to provide even better results.Software TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc