Emulation of large scale WSN: from real neighbors to imaginary destination

International audienceSetting up large experimental testbeds for wireless sensor networks (WSN) requires access to a huge surface as well as extensive financial and human resources. Due to limited access to such infrastructures, the vast majority of existing theoretical and simulation studies on georouting are not evaluated in real environments. A more affordable approach is needed to provide preliminary insights on network protocols performance. To overcome the need for a large number of sensors required to perform realistic experiments we introduce a novel approach to emulation. We propose to emulate large scale experiment by using a smaller number of core sensor nodes. These nodes are the 1-hop neighborhood of node S, currently holding the packet to forward, and are potential next hops. The destination position is virtual, outside of this real neighborhood. Emulation is performed as follows: (i) S transmits the packet over a real wireless channel to the selected forwarding node B, (ii) re-map the node B to S and its neighborhood to core nodes, (iii) adjust the position of the virtual destination by translating it by BS. We repeat these steps until the virtual destination falls into the 1-hop neighborhood of the node currently holding the packet. Compared to real testbeds, our emulation allows testing networks of very high densities and provides unlimited scalability