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.
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