Detailed Simulation of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of many small nodes. Each node has a microprocessor, a radio chip, some sensors, and is usually battery powered which limits network lifetime. Applications of wireless sensor networks range from environmental monitoring and health-care to industrial automation and military surveillance. Since the nodes are battery powered and communication consumes more power than computation much of the research focuses on power efficient communication. One of the problems is however to measure the power consumption and communication quality. Simulation of sensor networks can greatly increase development speed and also be used for evaluating power consumption as well as communication quality. For application and system development, simulators can be used to test code functionality and find software bugs. For research experiments, simulators can be used to get easier access to fine grained results than corresponding real world experiments. One problem with simulators is that it is hard to show that a simulation experiment corresponds well with a similar real world experiment. This thesis studies how detailed simulation of wireless sensor networks can be validated for power profiling accuracy and shows that detailed, emulation based simulation is a useful tool for white-box interoperability testing. Both power profiling and interoperability testing represent important topics in today’s wireless sensor network research and development. The results and main contributions of the thesis are the simulation platform COOJA/MSPSim and that we show that three low-power MACprotocol experiments performed in our simulator COOJA/MSPSim correspond well with experiments performed in our testbed. We also show that using COOJA/MSPSim any software running in the simulation can be power profiled, and that COOJA/MSPSim can be used for white-box interoperability testing.