Realistic performance analysis of WSN protocols through trace based simulation

It is a difficult endeavor to realistically evaluate the performance of wireless sensor network (WSN) protocols. Generic network simulators are often used, but they tend to rely on synthetic models. Because WSN performance can be affected by many subtle features, these simulators lack a certain level of realism. The most realistic performance assessment is to implement the protocol in question and observe its performance in a real world deployment. This approach, however, is time consuming, costly, and makes the direct comparison of various protocols nearly impossible. We believe there exists a need to evaluate the real-world performance of WSN protocols in a controlled and repeatable fashion. To that end, we enable trace based WSN simulation by first enhancing an existing WSN profiler that automates the collection of connectivity traces and the generation of statistical link properties. We then present a trace based WSN simulator built on the discrete event simulator SimPy using the standard Python. The use of the high level language Python allows new WSN protocols to be rapidly prototyped and evaluated under the real-world conditions captured by the WSN profiler. To validate the premise that our simulation results closely model the real-world performance of the same protocol, we present a thorough performance analysis of the modern WSN collection tree protocol (CTP). Our approach enables the creation and use of a WSN trace database collected from various deployment environments. Such a database could be used to both fairly and more realistically benchmark existing WSN protocols and provide timely feedback on the real-world performance of protocols still in the development process.