Abstract
Planning and deploying a functional large scale Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) or a Network of Internet of Things (IoTs) is a challenging task, especially in complex urban environments. A main network design bottleneck is the existence and/or correct usage of appropriate cross layer simulators that can generate realistic results for the scenario of interest. Existing network simulators tend to overlook the complexity of the physical radio propagation layer and consequently do not realistically simulate the main radio propagation conditions that take place in urban or suburban environments, thus passing inaccurate results between Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers. This work demonstrates through simulations and measurements that, by correctly passing physical information to higher layers, the overall simulation process produces more accurate results at the network layer. It is demonstrated that the resulting simulation methodology can be utilized to accomplish realistic wireless planning and performance analysis of the deployed nodes, with results that are very close to those of real test-beds, or actual WSN deployments.
Highlights
The main radio propagation mechanisms taking place in outdoor and/or indoor suburban or urban areas include reflections, transmissions, diffraction and in certain occasions scattering.Empirical or semi-empirical radio propagation modelling techniques can be limited in nature, can be used only in similar environments and conditions like the ones used to develop the models and tend to suffer from high standard deviations around the mean received signal strength (RSS) value
Still, when the wireless system performance is characterised by a bimodal behaviour, i.e., in wireless sensor or Internet of Things (IoTs) networks based on Zigbee or 802.15.4 technologies, accurate prediction results at the edge of coverage are of paramount importance since miscalculations can lead to non-functional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) or IoT Network deployments
We present the result analysis of the proposed simulation methodology that combines results from two simulators that operate at different Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers for the purpose of increasing simulation accuracy
Summary
The main radio propagation mechanisms taking place in outdoor and/or indoor suburban or urban areas include reflections, transmissions, diffraction and in certain occasions scattering. Existing wireless network layer simulators tend to implement and use simplistic propagation models, such as free space loss, plane earth loss, or utilize statistical or semi-empirical models, which are inadequate to extract realistic coverage results [3]. A simplified procedure for generating a real city environment, based on either importing the 3D building data, or by creating the environment in the TruNET environment, configuring the constitutive, or electrical, parameters of various materials such as walls, glass, earth, metal, etc., parameterization and deployment of a large number of sensors or interfering devices in the city environment, based on a set of dynamic rules, large scale physical layer simulation capability, using deterministic radio propagation models, ensuring realistic Received Signal Strength (RSS) coverage estimation, and interference prediction, accurate network layer performance calculation through tight integration with the Cooja network simulator
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