Improving the speed and scalability of distributed simulations of sensor networks

Distributed simulation techniques are commonly used to improve the speed and scalability of wireless sensor network simulators. However, accurate simulations of dynamic interactions of sensor network applications incur large synchronization overheads and severely limit the performance of existing distributed simulators. In this paper, we present two novel techniques that significantly reduce such overheads by minimizing the number of sensor node synchronizations during simulations. These techniques work by exploiting radio and MAC specific characteristics without reducing simulation accuracy. In addition, we present a new probing mechanism that makes it possible to exploit any potential application specific characteristics for synchronization reductions. We implement and evaluate these techniques in a cycle accurate distributed simulation framework that we developed based on Avrora. In our experiments, the radio-level technique achieves a speedup of 2 to 3 times in simulating 1-hop ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IPSN
• Authors: Zhong-Yi Jin, Rajesh K. Gupta
• Keywords: IPSN 2009, Sensor Network, Sensor Network Simulators, Sensor Networks, Simulation