PASENS: Parallel Sensor Network Simulator

This paper presents a Parallel Sensor Network Simulator (PASENS) to shorten the time in a large-scale wireless sensor network simulation. The degree of details of the simulation must be high to verify the behavior of the network and to estimate its power consumption and execution time of an application program as accurately as possible. Instruction-level simulation can provide those functions. But, when the degree of details is higher, the simulation time becomes longer. We propose an optimal-synchronous parallel discrete-event simulation method to shorten the simulation time. In this method, sensor nodes are partitioned into subsets, and PCs interconnected through a network are in charge of simulating one of the subsets. Results of experiments using PASENS show, in the case that the number of sensor nodes is large, the speedup tends to approach the square of the number of PCs participating in a simulation. We verified that the simulator provides high speedup and scalability enough to simulate maximum 20,000 sensor nodes.