Framework for Event Discrete Simulation (FEDS)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have recently gained much momentum in research and development, its potential to provide valuable services in key areas like military surveillances and mobile applications have attracted much attention from government and commercial research organisations. Researchers however, might not have the resources to purchase large numbers of sensors to obtain concrete research findings. Thus simulators are being created in an attempt to mimic conditions in the real world, providing research conclusions with an acceptable level of accuracy. Discrete event simulation is one way of building up models to observe the time based (or dynamic) behavior of a system. Existing discrete event sensor simulators, e.g. ATEMU, JProwler, SNetSim and SensorSim, have a tendency to be specific to hardware, not platform portable or even lack information on the flow of events. Different simulators will be reviewed in this article, some simulators are build to accept only MICA2 sensors models while others are either incomplete or has insufficient visual impact. This article will introduce FEDS (Framework for Event Discrete Simulation) which is designed to simulate objects functioning in the real physical world, events occurred are treated like messages which are being sent to environment mediums (air or water) for processing and decision making. FEDS is a generic framework meant for discrete event simulations, it can be customised by developers to simulate many scenarios from shipping lines planning to sensor networks and the objects in FEDS themselves can be further customized. FEDS is also designed to allow easy tracing of events, users can easily trace the flow of events and better understand the details of operation. Being a java implementation, FEDs is designed to be scalable and portable. This article will also look at how we can adapt a sensor network test bed to the proposed framework, messages are being sent from a sensor to another sensor in a sensor bed. A trace is also being created to observe the flow of events and how sensors react when messages are received/sent, this will allow better understanding of what has happened and can be used to prove a routes performance over others.