DiSenS: Scalable Distributed Sensor Network Simulation

Simulation is widely used for developing, evaluating and analyzing sensor network applications, especially when deploying a large scale sensor network remains expensive and labor intensive. However, due to its computation intensive nature, existent simulation tools have to make trade-offs between fidelity and scalability and thus offer limited capabilities as design and analysis tools. In this paper, we introduce DiSenS (DIstributed SENsor network Simulation) – a highly scalable distributed simulation system for sensor networks. DiSenS does not only faithfully emulates an extensive set of sensor hardware and supports extensible radio/power models, so that sensor network applications can be simulated transparently with high fidelity, but also employs distributed-memory parallel cluster system to attack the complex simulation problem. Combining an efficient distributed synchronization protocol and a sophisticated node partitioning algorithm (based on existent research), DiSenS achieves greater scalability than even many discrete event simulators. On a small to medium size cluster (16-64 nodes), DiSenS is able to simulate hundreds of motes in realtime speed and scale to thousands in sub-realtime speed. To our knowledge, DiSenS is the first full-system sensor network simulator with such scalability