SNIPER: A Wireless Sensor Network simulator

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is fast becoming the holy grail of digital surveillance, data monitoring and analysis. Being relatively cheap, lowpowered and easy to deploy WSNs is being adopted in a range of different fields. Currently, the focus is towards optimizing techniques used to form sensor clusters and to route data within a network. In order to satisfy these goals a significant amount of research is being done globally and what tends to be lacking at times is the right tools to make such research work less time consuming and inexpensive. The use of simulation tools is one such adaptation that can help researchers closely analyse a particular aspect of WSN while sticking with a known environment that is applicable to other scenarios in a similar way. This paper presents the performance and features of WSNSim, a WSN Simulator and the immediate advantages that can be experienced by researchers working on various realms in this area. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg