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Network simulations are widely used in sensor network research to design and evaluate network protocols. With the help of network simulation, protocol developer can reduce the time and cost involved in setting up an entire test environment containing multiple sensors and sink nodes. One of the major requirements in sensor simulation is to achieve accurate results. However, most sensor network simulators still suffer from the lack of realistic and available models for an accurate simulation of real protocols. Unfortunately, this can lead to unexpected or inaccurate simulation results which can result in the inappropriate decisions. In this paper, we propose a unified simulation framework to improve the accuracy and extensibility of the protocol stack in sensor operating systems. The aim of this study is to provide more realistic capabilities and extensive models. Our approach is based on the implementation of real sensor protocols, which are slightly modified at some system dependent points and complemented with real world data. The virtualization of the sensor protocol stack in our framework has an ability to provide a generalized protocol stack interface and share various protocols among multiple simulators. We demonstrate an implementation of the proposed framework adapted to existing well-known simulation packages. Experiments on the sensor protocol stack show that the proposed framework yields more extensive and accurate results.

Keywords: sensor operating system, protocol stack, virtualization, network simulation

Retrieve PDF document (201211_03.pdf)

Received May 31, 2011; accepted March 31, 2012.
Communicated by Junyoung Heo and Tei-Wei Kuo.
^* This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2012-C1090-1221-0010).
² Corresponding author: jiman@ssu.ac.kr.