Location service design and simulation in ad hoc wireless sensor networks

Platform-Based Design (PBD) is relatively a new methodology for the design of embedded systems. In this paper, its adoption is proposed and investigated for the design of an Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Network (AWSN), in particular for supporting a positioning application and a general protocol architecture is presented as well. The primary purpose is to abstract the set of lower layers (platform) in a way that allows its behaviour to be effectively accounted for in performance assessment of a protocol running on the upper layer. A comprehensive simulation framework is then proposed, which includes i) OMNeT++ for performance estimation in an efficient discrete event simulation environment and ii) TOSSIM as a behavioural simulator that allows compiling a TinyOS application to native and take advantage of traditional programming tools such as debuggers.