SimX: an Integrated Sensor Network Simulation and Evaluation Environment

Introduction

It is well known that designing, testing and debugging sensor networks are extremely hard. It is mainly due to limited resources and distributed natures of sensor networks. In a lab environment, it is difficult and tedious to try various network configurations and simulate various challenging environment factors. Thereafter, the sensor network community has longed for a good sensor network simulation tool allowing the philosophy of WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get. We present the design and evaluation of a visualized network manipulation tool, called SimX. The SimX includes the following features: (1) topology manipulation, which allows a simple mouse drag on the virtual network node to actually change the physical network topology and the link qualities; (2) timing control, which allows a user to control a simulation to run faster or slower, even to pause the simulation; (3) variable watch and conditional breakpoints, which allow a user to watch variable value changes of all network nodes concurrently and set conditional breakpoints; (4) sensor input control, which allows a user to simulate different sensor data inputs and sampling rates. Besides supporting those traditional evaluation criteria, such as throughput, energy efficiency and delivery ratio, the SimX also supports a holistic evaluation methodology. The holistic evaluation methodology evaluates how well the holistic high-level spatial and temporal environmental changes have been recorded, not only those low level engineering criteria.

simx

Features

SimX is an add-on tool for simulation experiments, but also extensions for Tossim bunched with Tinyos 2.x. This tool changes traditional development style based on Tossim. SimX support critical features: Simulation Speed Control, Topology Manipulation, Variable Watching, Date Reading Input and Holistic Evaluation.

The features of this research include:

  • Simulation Topology Manipulation :
    • allows a user to change the simulated network’s physical connectivity. A simple mouse drag on the virtual network node will actually change the physical network topology and the link qualities.
    • allows user to turn on or off a node.
    • suitable for network mobility and disruption simulations.
  • Simulation Runtime Control :
    • allows a user to control a simulation to run faster or slower.
    • enables simulation time to synchronize real time. This feature is offer by TOSSIM Live, but we make its usage more
      user friendly.
  • Simulation Variables Watching :
    • allows user to watch variable value changes of all nodes concurrently during simulation running time
    • allows user to set a pause condition to set break point.
  • Simulation Sensor Data Input :
    • allows a user to simulate a sensor’s data input
    • simulates different sampling rate of different nodes
  • Simulation Holistic Evaluation Methdology :
    • generate instinctive evalution method for sensor network

Downloads from CVS

  • $cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos login
  • $cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co -P ./tinyos-2.x-contrib/wsu/tools
  • installation instruction is in wsu/tools/simx/simx/readme

Faculty

Students

  • Paul Stickney
  • Xiaogang Yang