J-Sim: A Simulation and emulation environment for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have gained considerable attention in the past few years. They have found application domains in battlefield communication, homeland security, pollution sensing, and traffic monitoring. As such, there has been an increasing need to define and develop simulation frameworks for carrying out high-fidelity WSN simulation. In this article we present a modeling, simulation, and emulation framework for WSNs in J-Sim - an open source, component-based compositional network simulation environment developed entirely in Java. This framework is built on the autonomous component architecture and extensible internetworking framework of J-Sim, and provides an object-oriented definition of target, sensor, and sink nodes, sensor and wireless communication channels, and physical media such as seismic channels, mobility models, and power models (both energy-producing and energy-consuming components). Application-specific models can be defined by subclassing classes in the simulation framework and customizing their behaviors. We also include in J-Sim a set of classes and mechanisms to realize network emulation. We demonstrate the use of the proposed WSN simulation framework by implementing several well-known localization, geographic routing, and directed diffusion protocols, and perform performance comparisons (in terms of the execution time incurred and memory used) in simulating WSN scenarios in J-Sim and ns-2. The simulation study indicates the WSN framework in J-Sim is much more scalable than ns-2 (especially in memory usage). We also demonstrate the use of the WSN framework in carrying out real-life full-fledged Future Combat System (FCS) simulation and emulation