Enabling Accurate, Energy-Aware, and Scalable Simulation of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are heavily utilized, for example, in industry, agriculture, forestry, and home automation. A WSN comprises several resource-constrained, tiny sensing devices - the sensor nodes. One of the most important properties of a WSN is the energy consumption, as in many applications the battery-powered nodes should achieve lifetimes of several years. Especially the timing of the firmware and hardware components has a major impact on the consumed energy. Evaluation of WSNs is a challenging task and simulation has shown to be the most cost-effective approach which delivers reliable, repeatable, and scalable results. Based on the discussion of related work, I argue that there is a gap in state-of-the-art WSN simulators which enable either scalable or accurate simulation. I further propose a new simulation methodology to close the gap, thus enabling scalable and accurate simulation of the timing and energy consumption of WSNs. In addition, I claim that ignoring firmware runtimes as proposed by some simulators results in erroneous energy consumption predictions, thus making simulation less meaningful. The third derived hypothesis is, that using nowadays duty-cycle MAC protocols, the energy consumption ratio between a node's microcontroller and radio transceiver has shifted towards the microcontroller which can no longer be neglected. To validate the proposed hypotheses a research method is used which is based on a qualitative and quantitative discussion. ...