Sensor Network Simulator for Ubiquitous Application Development

Software simulations have been widely used for the design and application development of a wireless sensor network that is an infrastructure of ubiquitous computing. In this study, we develop a sensor network simulator that can verify the behavior of sensor network applications, estimate execution time and power consumption, and simulate a large-scale sensor network. To implement the simulator, we use an instruction-level parallel discrete-event simulation method. Instruction-level simulation uses executable images loaded into a real sensor board as workload, such that it results in the high degree of details. Parallel simulation makes simulation of a large-scale sensor network possible by distributing workload into multiple computers. The simulator can predict the amount of power consumption based on operating time of modules in a sensor node and counting the number of executed instructions by kind. Also it can simulate ubiquitous applications with various scenarios and debug programs. Instruction traces used as workload for simulations are executable images produced by the cross-compiler for ATmega128L microcontroller.