Abstract
Sensor network simulations require high fidelity and timing accuracy to be used as an implementation and evaluation tool. The cycle-accurate and instruction-level simulator is the known solution for these purposes. However, this type of simulation incurs a high computation cost since it has to model not only the instruction level behavior but also the synchronization between multiple sensors for their causality. This paper presents a novel technique that exploits asynchronous simulations of interrupt service routines (ISR). We can avoid the synchronization overheads when the interrupt service routines are simulated without preemption. If the causality errors occur, we devise a rollback procedure to restore the original synchronized simulation. This concept can be extended to any instruction-level sensor network simulator. Evaluation results show our method can enhance the simulation speed up to 52% in the case of our experiments. For applications with longer interrupt service routines and smaller number of preemptions, the speedup becomes greater. In addition, our simulator is 2 to 11 times faster than the well-known sensor network simulator.
Highlights
Since scalable networked sensors are deployed over wide geographical areas, once they are installed, it is difficult to maintain them
Wireless sensor network simulators are very attractive and useful tools to the developers. They allow users to simulate their software under various operating conditions such as radio interference, geographical effects and functional behaviors. Network simulators such as NS-2 [1], SensorSim [2], GloMosim [3] and QualNet [4] are used in classical sensor network simulations
We propose a novel technique for enhancing the speed of the sensor network simulations
Summary
Since scalable networked sensors are deployed over wide geographical areas, once they are installed, it is difficult to maintain them. Sensor network applications generally have low duty cycles, so that simulators can skip many cycles with the method while sensor nodes are sleeping Another major cause of slow simulation speed is the synchronization overhead. Every conventional sensor network simulator uses various conservative approaches to maintain the causality, even though they generate synchronization overheads. PolarLite [10] and SnapSim [11] are extensions of Avrora to reduce the number of synchronization points because if synchronizations between sensor nodes can be avoided during simulation, the scalability can be improved. They focus on the interval for synchronization by network transmission protocols.
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