International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Aug 2013)
Integrated Validation System for the Simulation of Diverse Sensors in WSNs
Abstract
In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensors use different types of information, such as temperatures, humidity, magnetic fields, and sound; their communication distances and battery sizes and capacities may be different. Differences in communication distances and battery capacities when the same communication method is used affect the life of the entire sensor network topology. Tests for the maximum life of the sensor network topology require many sensor nodes and huge proportional costs. In addition, experiments to verify new ideas for WSNs as alternatives to existing methods also require large expenditures. Since experiments with the arrangement of actual sensors are expensive, such experiments are conducted using simulators so that solutions for protocol design and verification can be compared through software. Existing simulators are tailored to certain sensor characteristics, so that only quite limited results can be obtained through the implementation of simulated operations, simulations of sensor arrangements, and the comparison of limited information transmission routing functions provided by simulators. This paper proposes diverse sensor definable simulators (DSDs) for the performance of experiments on diverse sensors with different communication distances in WSN environments where Geography Markup Language (GML) based coordinates are utilized.