DiSenS: Scalable Distributed Sensor Network Simulation

Abstract — Simulation can be a very useful tool for developing, evaluating and analyzing sensor network applications, especially when deploying a large scale sensor network remains an expensive and labor intensive endeavor. However, the difficulty of achieving both fidelity and scalability has limited its use as a design and analysis tool. In this paper, we describe DiSenS (DIstributed SENsor network Simulation) – a complete scalable and extensible distributed simulation system for sensor networks. DiSenS provides a cycleaccurate device emulator that is extendable by various fidelityenhancing models (radio, power, etc.) for tunable simulation accuracy. A key distinguishing feature of DiSenS is that it is implemented for distributed-memory parallel cluster systems. To achieve efficiency in this computational setting we have designed a simple and efficient distributed synchronization protocol and coupled it with a sophisticated node partitioning algorithm (not of our design) to achieve new scalability and performance levels. I