Accurate and Scalable Simulation of Network of Heterogeneous Sensor Devices

Simulation is an important tool to study and analyze sensor networks. Prior work in sensor network simulation focuses on homogeneous devices. In this paper, we present a system that performs scalable and accurate simulation of a network of heterogeneous sensor devices, including both Stargate intermediate level devices and mote devices. We study accuracy, performance, and scalability of our system. The results show that we can achieve accurate functional behavior for both standalone Stargate simulation and ensemble simulation of a Stargate and motes. For motes, we have less than 4.06% cycle count error for all benchmarks and for Stargate, we have less than 10% error for most benchmarks, and less than 12.5% error for all benchmarks. We also achieve less than 3.6% error for all benchmarks when simulating an ensemble of Stargate and motes. Our system is also more scalable than prior work. We can simulate 160 sensor nodes in real time speed and 2,048 sensor nodes with ten times slowdown on a 16-node cluster.