A TOSSIM based implementation and analysis of collection tree protocol in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks has been a thrust area of research in recent years. Among the various topics in wireless sensor networks, data collection has been an important area of research. Many wireless sensor networks generally depend on some collection oriented service to route data packets from source to the sink. Various protocols have been devised regarding data collection in wireless sensor networks among which the collection tree protocol is an important one. TinyOS is an operating system specifically designed for wireless sensor networks. Since sensor networks are constrained in power consumption point of view, this operating system provides an excellent platform for development of various applications in wireless sensor networks keeping in mind the limitations of the sensor devices. Sensor networks are sometimes set up in remote locations and testing of applications in those environments becomes troublesome. Thus to facilitate the entire evaluation of the protocol a simulation of the network can be done. This paper deals with the TOSSIM (TinyOS Simulator) based approach towards simulation of collection tree protocol in wireless sensor networks and the analysis of the performance of the protocol considering various scenarios. TOSSIM or TinyOS Simulator is a well known simulator that can be used to simulate an entire TinyOS application. This paper also carries out an analysis that will provide a glimpse regarding the performance of collection tree protocol and at the same time will give an insight on how TOSSIM can be used as a simulation platform for implementation of collection tree protocol.