A Brief Survey on Simulators for Designing Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Simulators for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have evolved significantly, offering various features and capabilities to simulate WSNs accurately. While some simulators excel in realistic channel modeling and scalability, others prioritize energy consumption modeling and user-friendly interfaces. Standardization and interoperability efforts are underway but require further collaboration among simulator developers. In this paper, we have given a brief survey on simulation software/simulators that have been used predominantly for designing routing protocols in WSN. This survey includes a discussion of NS-3, NS-2, OMNET++, COOJA, TOSSIM, Castalia, MiXiM, Qualnet, NetSim, WSNet, NS-2, and OPNET simulators. The evolution of these simulators along with their comparison for different parameters and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Further, we have also presented the steps to design the routing protocol for NS-3 and Qualnet software pertaining to WSN. This survey will be helpful to the researchers to make the choice of the available simulators pertaining to their research problem.