GELSenVAC: A Novel Sensor Network Framework for WSN Simulation

Abstract

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are emerging because of the technological developments in wireless communication and the advancements in miniaturization of sensor hardware nodes. WSN is an Adhoc network with more number of nodes densely deployed. The main focus of any WSN is to maximize the lifetime of the network as the sensor nodes are having limited battery energy and the nodes are unattended. Lifetime of the WSN depends on various parameters such as hardware used, number of nodes, deployment strategies, MAC protocol, routing protocol, sampling rate, sampling time, etc. To determine the lifetime of WSN apriori to real time deployment, simulator software is used for evaluating the impact of various parameters influencing the lifetime. Global Mobile Simulator (GloMoSim) is one such text based simulator software used for simulating wireless networks. GloMoSim is not supporting the required features, viz., sensor specific MAC and routing protocols, energy model for lifetime estimation, and charting facility for WSN Simulation. In this paper, the design of novel easy to use GUI with Energy model based Lifetime estimation supported Sensor network framework with Visualization, Application statistics, and Charting facility tools, GELSenVAC, is proposed and implemented. It consists of hardware support for TelosB, MicaZ motes, Sensor MAC (S-MAC) protocol support in data link layer, energy model for lifetime estimation, facility to view application level statistics, and charting facility to generate lifetime charts, on top of GloMoSim environment. By using this framework, designers can easily simulate their own WSN, estimate the lifetime, and select suitable parameters to increase the lifetime of the network. The designed framework is tested by simulating a WSN. The computed lifetime and the results obtained using the tools supported by this framework are presented.