Simulating Wireless Sensor Network Middleware Using Compute Unified Device Architecture

As constant growing of wireless sensor networks' scale and application areas in recent years, the research on the middleware of wireless sensor network has attracted a lot of attentions. But the simulation tools for wireless sensor networks available are time consuming for middleware simulation because of the large number of the network nodes and too much low-level information processed. A prototype simulation platform was designed and implemented using compute unified device architecture. With the parallel computing capacity of the Nvidia's video card, the simulation speed can be greatly improved. A middleware scenario for data query is presented to illustrate the merits of the simulator, and the results show that up to 80 times speeding up can be achieved. Furthermore, the additional work to implement the simulation prototype to general use is also discussed. The simulation prototype has showed good potentials to support research and development of middleware software for wireless sensor network.